MCWILLIAMS, CAREY Historian, journalist, activist, author of Southern California: An Island on the Land and California: The Great Exception. McWilliams reported and editorialized on California’s most important battles for social justice of the last century. He also helped organize committees that won several of them. Other fights, such as the one to get the government to admit its mistake in interning Japanese Americans during World War II, were won only after his death. A contagiously jovial writer, McWilliams found the stupidity of politicians not only unconscionable but risible. His merry takeouts on California’s water wars and ecology have left writers as varied as Robert Towne and Mike Davis in his debt. Diaries preserved in the UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, and published here by gracious permission of his scholar granddaughter.
MENCKEN, H. L. Newspaperman and author of a series of gleeful ragbags titled Prejudices, the much-revised landmark The American Language, even a youthful translation of Ibsen. Mencken’s biliously quotable prose is the culmination of all the Twain and Wilde that Mencken ingested from childhood—Twain for sand, Wilde for silk—and the disappointment he must have felt when nobody else measured up. He said such wonderful things as “A horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.” Enjoyed his brief reporting visit here like a mountain lion enjoys a mule deer. Quoted from Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters: The Private Correspondence of H. L. Mencken and Sara Haardt, edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987).
MERRITT, RUTH WOLFFE Douglas Aircraft worker here in World War II. Quotation published by gracious permission of her granddaughter-in-law.
MILLER, HENRY Author of Tropic of Cancer, The Cosmological Eye, and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Relocated from the cliffs of Big Sur to the bluffs of Pacific Palisades to spend his last years here. Quoted from Letters by Henry Miller to Hoki Tokuda Miller, edited by Joyce Howard (New York: Freundlich Books, 1986).
MILLIKAN, ROBERT Caltech president, Nobel Laureate for measuring the charge of an electron, and eventual anticommunist informer for the FBI. Quoted from “The Creation of LA’s ‘Most Recognizable and Beloved’ Building,” by Hadley Meares, posted at https://la.curbed.com/2014/12/17/10011026/the-creation-of-las-most-recognizable-and-beloved-building-1 (2014).
MINGUS, CHARLES Pathbreaking black–Chinese–German–Native American jazz composer and musician. Raised in Watts playing classical cello, then found the double bass and jazz. Quoted from his memoir Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus (New York: Knopf, 1971).
MIX, TOM Movie cowboy, valiant hero to a generation of American boys. Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).
MONROE, MARILYN Actress and star of Some Like It Hot and The Misfits. Quoted from Marilyn Monroe Day by Day, by Carl Rollyson (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
MOORE, ERNEST CARROLL Co-founder of UCLA. Quoted from UCLA: The First Century, by Marina Dundjerski (Los Angeles: Third Millennium Publishing, 2011).
MORA, BISHOP FRANCIS Bishop of Los Angeles. Personal letter at http://www.jmaw.org/bernard-cohn-jewish-la/.
MOTLEY, WILLARD F. African American author of the social-protest novel Knock on Any Door, adapted into the Humphrey Bogart film. Later moved to Mexico. Nephew of the artist Archibald Motley. Didn’t stay long, but plenty of journalists have stayed longer and seen less. Quoted from “Small Town Los Angeles,” Commonweal (June 30, 1939).
MUIR, JOHN Writer, naturalist. There had been California writers before Muir, just as there had been American writers before Emerson. But not until Muir met Emerson on a Sierra mountaintop did he find his own voice. Muir’s first published essay, “Yosemite Glaciers,” appeared just seven months after they met. Returned often to visit family and to hike and write about the San Gabriel Mountains, most memorably in “The Bee-Pastures,” chapter 16 of The Mountains of California. Quoted from John Muir in Southern California, by Elizabeth Pomeroy (Pasadena, Calif.: The Castle Press, 1999).
NABOKOV, VLADIMIR Russian-born author of Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire. Nabokov’s prose is beautiful—and often uproarious—in ways that no native English speaker would think to write. He knew English from lessons and books, but his arrival in the United States in 1940 may have marked his first real opportunity to hear English spoken badly. The evidence suggests that he found the sound intoxicating. Always oblique yet never obscure, Nabokov sounds like English on the morning of its birth, with every word equally available to him, and all ruts of habit gone suddenly smooth. In 1960, he took a rented villa at 2088 Mandeville Canyon in Los Angeles to work on a screenplay of Lolita for the young director Stanley Kubrick. Not much of Nabokov’s work remains in the finished film, but he liked the unorthodox screenplay he wrote enough to publish it later. Graciously, he also spoke well of Kubrick’s version, but retained sole screen credit for himself. According to biographer Brian Boyd, “He and Vera would have been ready to settle permanently in ‘charming semitropical’ California if their son had not been singing in Milan.” In 1963, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Vladimir Nabokov in the Best Adapted Screenplay category. There’s no indication that he returned to Los Angeles for the Oscar ceremony, alas. Nabokov lost to Horton Foote for To Kill a Mockingbird. Quoted from Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, edited, annotated, and with an introductory essay by Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
NASH, OGDEN Poet and wit. Came for the movies, missed his family too much to stay long. Quoted from Loving Letters of Ogden Nash, edited by Linell Nash Smith (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
NIN, ANAÏS Frenchwoman of letters, author of Delta of Venus. Led parallel lives with her husband in New York and her longtime paramour in Sierra Madre. Quoted from The Diaries of Anaïs Nin, vols. 6, 7, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, 1980).
NISHIDA, J. W. Jailed Communist bookseller. Quoted from Gentle Rebel: Letters of Eugene V. Debs, edited by J. Robert Constantine (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
ODETS, CLIFFORD Pioneering playwright and screenwriter of American social drama. Author of plays including Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy, and several films, among them Sweet Smell of Success and The Big Knife, from his play about compromise in Hollywood. In 1940 he kept his only journal, which he himself called “the daily diary, often naïve, sometimes crude, occasionally pompous, prejudiced, mannered, unfair, even conceited and arrogant. Its pages cover almost a full year in the personal life of a ‘successful’ writer living in a very ‘successful’ country.” He died on August 14, 1963, on the same day and in the same hospital where I was born. Quoted from The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets, with an introduction by his son, Walt Whitman Odets (New York: Grove Press, 1988).
OJEDA, EVELYN Gold medalist in the 1932 Olympic Games. Quoted in Andrew Bell, “Female Gold Medalist from 1932 Olympics Turns 100,” USA Today.
O’MELVENY, HENRY Lawyer, city father, founder of O’Melveny & Myers. Quoted from History of the Law Firm of O’Melveny & Myers, by William W. Clary (Los Angeles: Privately printed, 1966).
PALEY, AARON As much as anybody, Paley is the urbanist most responsible for L.A.’s recent renaissance. Co-creator of CicLAvia, the quarterly Sunday happening during which all automobile traffic is banished from some of this city’s most traffic-choked boulevards. Every three months—monthly, if Paley ever gets his way—Angelenos now reclaim their streets on foot, on bicycles, on rickshaws, you name it. The result has fairly transformed the way L.A. thinks of itself. Quoted by gracious permission.
PALIN, MICHAEL Author, actor, Python, screenwriter of A Fish Called Wanda. Has slithered into Los Angeles whenever his career obliged him, including for the Pythons’ triumphant stand at the Hollywood Bowl. Quoted from his Diari
es, 1969–1979: The Python Years (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007).
PARKER, DOROTHY Witty, tragicomic writer of magazine feuilletons, book reviews, poems, and short stories including “Big Blonde.” Lived here off and on writing scripts, including her Oscar-nominated, delightful adaptation, with S. J. Perelman, of Around the World in 80 Days. Quoted from You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker, by John Keats (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970).
PARTCH, HARRY Avant-garde composer. Lived here in the twenties and thirties. Dropped out of USC to compose. Ushering for the Philharmonic helped keep body and soul together. Designer of irreproducible musical instruments. Alumnus of the WPA’s Federal Writers Project in California. Quoted from Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos, edited by Thomas McGeary (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
PATTON, GEORGE Attorney, father of General George S. Patton. Descended from pioneer Don Benito Wilson. Quoted from General Patton: A Soldier’s Life, by Stanley P. Hirshson (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).
PEARS, PETER Opera singer, partner of the composer Benjamin Britten. Quoted from The Travel Diaries of Peter Pears, 1936–1978, edited by Philip Reed (London: Boydell & Brewer, 1999).
PEGLER, WESTBROOK Newspaper columnist. Stopped here to file the once-obligatory hatchet job. Quoted from his column “Fair Enough,” The Washington Post, etc., King Features Syndicate, 1939.
PERCIVAL, OLIVE Writer, regional historian, and botanist. Olive Percival Papers (Collection 119), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.
PERELMAN, S. J. Dyspeptic writer, satirist, screenwriter. He and Nathanael West married sisters and lived here in the thirties. Visited L.A. periodically to write scripts, including his Oscar-nominated adaptation with Dorothy Parker of Around the World in 80 Days. Returned later in life as writer-in-residence in sadly knish-less Santa Barbara. Quoted from Don’t Tread on Me: The Selected Letters of S. J. Perelman, edited by Prudence Crowther (New York: Viking, 1986).
PERKOFF, STUART Poet, beatnik. Stuart Z. Perkoff Papers (Collection 1573), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.
PHILLIPS, D. L. Diarist who brought his consumptive son to California. Quoted from his Letters from California (Springfield: The Illinois State Journal, 1877).
PICKERING, EDWARD CHARLES American astronomer. Published as “Edward Charles Pickering’s Diary of a Trip to Pasadena to Attend a Meeting of Solar Union, August 1910,” edited by Howard Plotkin, Southern California Quarterly (Spring 1978).
PLATH, SYLVIA American poet (Ariel) and novelist (The Bell Jar). If only Sylvia Plath could have married Leonard Woolf, and Virginia Woolf could have married Ted Hughes, maybe everybody would have lived happily ever after. Plath visited California on a road trip to see her aunt in Pasadena, whose bountiful garden made a strong impression—though not as strong as an ornery bear she met in Yosemite. Quoted from Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, edited by Aurelia Schober Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).
POWELL, ANTHONY British novelist, author of the towering “Dance to the Music of Time” dodecalogy. Summoned from England to L.A. as a consultant on A Yank at Oxford. Quoted from To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell (New York: Penguin, 1984).
POWELL, DAWN Great “lost” writer of the mid-twentieth century, championed into rediscovery largely by Gore Vidal. Happy to visit here, but her heart was in New York. Quoted from The Diaries of Dawn Powell, edited with an introduction by Tim Page (South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1995).
PRATT, ORVILLE C. Jurist, traveler. Quoted from The Journal of Orville C. Pratt, 1848 (Utah: Hafen & Hafen, 1954).
PYNCHON, THOMAS RUGGLES, JR. American writer, born May 8, 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, spent some time in California, where three of his novels are set. Others range all over the globe and throughout history, often in the same book. Many pit a plucky heroine or poor, priapic, paranoid schnook against some bureaucratic, merciless conspiracy. The voice in his occasional nonfiction is postdoctoral yet cheerfully sophomoric, sad yet undespairing, as expressive in its alternation of long notes with short as an SOS. It’s an instrument tuned and retuned in more than half a century of occasional essays, reviews, and liner notes—forming one of the great uncollected anthologies in American letters. In fiction or nonfiction, Pynchon’s underlying verbal music stays ever recognizable, unique as a great reed player’s embouchure. He remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below, and sex from all sides, ringing endless fresh variations on the same two questions: What happened to the country we wanted? And can its original promise ever be redeemed? No one rivals Pynchon’s range of language, his elasticity of syntax, his signature mix of dirty jokes, dread and shining decency. (Letter quoted from the Stephen Michael Tomaske Collection of Thomas Pynchon, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., by gracious permission.)
RAMIREZ, FRANCISCO P. Pioneering prodigy of bilingual Los Angeles journalism, lovingly resurrected in A Clamor for Equality: Emergence and Exile of Californio Activist Francisco P. Ramirez, by Paul Bryan Gray (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012). Translations by Gray and me.
REAGAN, RONALD President, actor. Quoted from The Reagan Diaries, edited by Douglas Brinkley (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
REID, HUGO Early Scotch settler, author in the Los Angeles Star of the “Indian Letters,” calling attention to wretched conditions for Native Americans in post-statehood L.A. Quoted from the Los Angeles Star, 1852.
RENOIR, JEAN Screenwriter-director of The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion. Directed Swamp Water and The Southerner for Hollywood. Unfailingly amused by his sojourn here. Died in Beverly Hills. Quoted from his Letters, edited by Lorraine LeBianco and David Thompson (London: Faber & Faber, 1994).
REXROTH, KENNETH San Francisco–based poet, critic, translator, and radio commentator. Occasionally came down from San Francisco to L.A. for public appearances and broadcasts, and to disparage the restaurants. Later taught in Santa Barbara, where he died of a coronary so massive that his heart monitor blew a fuse. Published by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust. With thanks to the Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, 2017.
REYNOLDS, RYAN Actor, known for Buried and Deadpool, among others. Witty tweeter (https://twitter.com/vancityreynolds/status/817799908937736192?lang=en).
REZNIKOFF, CHARLES Poet. Worked as a script reader. Selected Letters of Charles Reznikoff, 1917–1976, edited by Milton Hindus (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1997).
RICE, HARVEY Ohio newspaper publisher, father-in-law of Orange County patriarch James Irvine, Sr. Stayed a week at his son-in-law’s Rancho San Joaquin. Quoted from his Letters from the Pacific Slope (New York: Appleton, 1870).
RICHARDSON, ROBERT A Times man. Shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Watts riots while still the classified advertising messenger, venturing where police officers, firefighters, and staff reporters feared to tread. That was his last night in the ad department. Quoted from “ ‘Get Whitey,’ Scream Blood-Hungry Mobs,” the Los Angeles Times, August 14 and 15, 1965.
RIVERS, JOAN Self-deprecating, insult-reliant, pioneering comedian. Quoted from her Diary of a Mad Diva (New York: Berkley, 2014).
ROCH, ROGERIO Dispossessed Californio. Quoted from The Condition of Affairs in Indian Territory and California: A Report, by Charles Cornelius Painter (Philadelphia: Indian Rights Association, 1888).
RODDENBERRY, GENE Beloved creator of Star Trek, former driver for LAPD chief William Parker. “Star Trek” Collection, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.
RODERICK, KEVIN Newspaperman, founding editor of LAObserved.com. Quoted by gracious permission.
RODRIGUEZ, JOSÉ Guatemalan American classical music impresario. Went to Manual Arts High School in L.A. Studied music. Found a mentor in the left-wi
ng editor Rob Wagner, the editor of a magazine in the 1920s and 1930s called Script, which some East-Coast-centric people called a West Coast version of The New Yorker. Rodriguez wrote mostly about music and wound up programming for both the Hollywood Bowl and the L.A. Philharmonic. He also became a host and music director for local radio stations, especially KFI, driven by a democratic, leveling, truly Angeleno vision for the potential of radio. Commissioned a striking Neutra house that still stands in Glendale. Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).
ROGERS, HARRISON Member of the Jedediah Smith expedition through California. Quoted from The Ashley-Smith Explorations and Discovery of a Central Route to the Pacific 1822–1829, edited by Harrison Clifford Dale (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1918).
ROGERS, WILL Humorist, entertainer, and newspaper columnist. Lovingly published at willrogers.com/writings.
ROOSEVELT, ELEANOR First Lady of the United States, shoulder to shoulder with her husband, Franklin, in the White House from 1933 to 1945. Peace advocate and social activist. Visited Los Angeles several times on goodwill tours to benefit the less fortunate. Champion of the New Deal, which paved roads and built bridges that Angelenos still drive every day. The Eleanor Roosevelt First Street Bridge, anybody? “My Day,” The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Digital Edition (2017), accessed Oct. 29, 2017 (https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1946&_f=md000295).
ROOSEVELT, THEODORE President of the United States and uncle of the above. The fatal shooting of President William McKinley on September 6, 1901, may well be the only political assassination in history that actually worked out for the best. In McKinley’s place, we got the indefatigable Teddy Roosevelt. It’s startling to realize just how many strains in contemporary American political thought trace their origins, under different names, to Roosevelt. His unprecedented efforts to conserve the country’s natural resources, inspired by his naturalist friends John Muir (q.v.) and John Burroughs, we now recognize as federal environmentalism in embryo. His trustbusting of Big Oil, Big Sugar, and Big Coal we wouldn’t hesitate to call anti-corporatism today. And Roosevelt’s overall progressive agenda looks uncannily like what people used to call modern liberalism, until the stigma attached to that word now has us calling it progressivism all over again. Amid all the nostalgia for Roosevelt the statesman—coupled with some revulsion against Roosevelt the imperialist—it’s easy to overlook Roosevelt the writer. But TR, as his hardy band of acolytes generally call him, worked at writing as he did at so much else in his life: prodigiously, brilliantly, tirelessly, and probably more than was good for him. Quoted from A Compilation of the Messages and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 1, edited by Albert Henry Lewis (New York and Washington: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1906).
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