<i> Our Greatest Literary Navigator</i>

When I think of Carey McWilliams, I do not think of a liberal; it is far too limiting a category. An informed skeptic, yes. A western populist, certainly, suspicious of order, the bureaucracy of order and the predators of order. But, primarily, when I think of Carey McWilliams, I think of a writer, a writer of astonishing gifts whose insights I have tapped shamelessly over the years. Were it not for “Factories in the Field,” I would not even have contemplated my own book, “Delano,” about Cesar Chavez and the farm worker strikes of the 1960s.

But if I had to pick my favorites among McWilliams’ books, I would choose “Southern California Country” and “California: The Great Exception.” They are great books, history as literature in every sense, neither polemic nor apology, simply cool and informative. The sources quoted by McWilliams are a gold mine, a historian’s dream.

McWilliams was a true Californian: He came from someplace else--in this case, Colorado. He was neither seduced by California nor hostile to it; he simply understood the state better than anyone who has ever written about it. “An essay in understanding” is what McWilliams called “The Great Exception,” and how accurate and perceptive that appraisal is.

“The image of California has been distorted in the mirror of the commonplace,” McWilliams wrote in that wonderful book. “The failure of understanding that resulted is based on the difficulty of avoiding the hyperbolic in describing a reality that seems weirdly out of scale, off balance, and full of fanciful distortion. For there is a golden haze over the land--the dust of gold is in the air--and the atmosphere is magical and mirrors many tricks, deceptions and wondrous visions .... One cannot, as yet, properly place California in the American scheme of things. The gold rush is still on, and everything remains topsy-turvy. The analyst of California is like a navigator who is trying to chart a course in a storm: the instruments will not work; the landmarks are lost; and the maps make little sense.”

McWilliams sells himself short. He is California’s greatest literary navigator. *