California Gold (113 page)

And my wife, Rachel, as always, has been there from the beginning, with her steadfast encouragement and unfailing love.

California author Gerald Haslam writes of “redskins” (native-born regionalists) and “palefaces” (literary carpetbaggers from outside the Golden State)—and I am unmistakably one of the latter. Perhaps I’ll never understand California as thoroughly or deeply as a writer born there; still, I have formed some strong views.

For example, the general level of travel writing about California is, in a word, pitiful. When I began to build my library of California books, I bought up all the standard travel guides that I could find. I opened them when my wife and I started planning our first research jaunt, and was horrified to discover, in such a purported industry “standard” as
Fodor’s California
, that the whole central part of California is ignored. One finds something about the Mother Lode country, and of course a little chapter on Yosemite, but there is just one skimpy mention of the vast agricultural basin that now supplies 25 percent of U.S. food crops. It hardly exists; it is a non-place. The editors of the volume assumed that visitors would never want to go there—even though the Central Valley is not only essential California, but fascinating in its own right. Unfortunately, most California travel books share this kind of shortcoming: Their California consists of San Francisco, the redwoods, Big Sur, Los Angeles, Disneyland, Universal City Studios, San Diego, Yosemite, and the casinos and resorts at Tahoe.

Moreover, the universe of California historical scholarship is finite and surprisingly small. Books that should exist simply don’t. A new scholarly history of the building of the Central Pacific is badly needed;
The Big Four
by Oscar Lewis has been the standard work since the 1930s, and while it’s good as far as it goes, it’s thin. There is an apologist biography of C. P. Huntington, but no balanced and readable one. There is no full biography of Ed Doheny that I could locate. There is no biography-filmography of Broncho Billy Anderson, our first Western movie star, who was as big as or bigger than William S. Hart, Tom Mix, or John Wayne. These and other gaps await some new and talented Ph.D. candidates in history.

In the late winter of 1988, as Melissa Totten and I were driving up to Riverside on a sunny but smoggy morning, she laughed and said, “When they ask you about the hardest part of studying California, you can tell them it was finding it in the pollution.” Right. There is a particular sadness in looking at present-day California, and then reading the descriptions of its clean, pristine beauty in works such as Nordhoff’s from the late nineteenth century. If California is quintessentially American, it is also the exemplar of the quintessential American ruin—the destruction of a place of God-given beauty, chiefly by the automobile, its manufacturers, sellers, and users. If I were to put a slogan on a bumper sticker, it would be this:
SAVE YOUR STATE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE
. Maybe it already is.

There was a kind of accidental symbolism in an event that occurred in March 1988, a few weeks before I wrote the first chapter: My fifth grandchild, Duncan, was born in Santa Rosa, California. My own roots go back to a farmer named John Downs, who fought in the Virginia Continental Line throughout most of the Revolution. My people, descended from Downs, who, as a veteran, was granted land by Congress, are mostly midwesterners. Duncan is the first native Californian in my family. It seemed a fitting and propitious omen.

To close, I present this novel to the diverse people of modern California, a gift in appreciation of what has been a wonderful learning experience.

—John Jakes

Greenwich, Connecticut

San Francisco, Santa Rosa,

Sonoma, Modesto, Yosemite,

Bakersfield, Riverside,

Los Angeles, California

Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

January 4, 1988—January 24, 1989

John Jakes is a bestselling author of historical fiction, science fiction, children’s books, and nonfiction. He is best known for his highly acclaimed eight-volume Kent Family Chronicles series, an American family saga that reaches from the Revolutionary War to 1890, and the North and South Trilogy, which follows two families from different regions during the American Civil War. His commitment to historical accuracy and evocative storytelling earned him the title “godfather of historical novelists” from the
Los Angeles Times
and led to his streak of sixteen consecutive
New York Times
bestsellers.

Born in Chicago in 1932, Jakes originally studied to be an actor, but he turned to writing professionally after selling his first short story for twenty-five dollars during his freshman year at Northwestern University. That check, Jakes later said, “changed the whole direction of my life.” He enrolled in DePauw University’s creative writing program shortly thereafter and graduated in 1953. The following year, he received his master’s degree in American literature from Ohio State University.  

While at DePauw, Jakes met Rachel Ann Payne, whom he married in 1951. After finishing his studies, Jakes worked as a copywriter for a large pharmaceutical company before transitioning to advertising, writing copy for several large firms, including Madison Avenue’s Dancer Fitzgerald Sample. At night, he continued to write fiction, publishing two hundred short stories and numerous mystery, western, and science fiction books. He turned to historical fiction, long an interest of his, in 1973 when he started work on
The Bastard
, the first novel of the Kent Family Chronicles. Jakes’s masterful hand at historical fiction catapulted
The Bastard
(1974) onto the bestseller list—with each subsequent book in the series matching
The Bastard
’s commercial success. Upon publication of the next three books in the series—
The Rebels
(1975),
The Seekers
(1975), and
The Furies
(1976)—Jakes became the first-ever writer to have three books on the
New York Times
bestseller list in a single year. The series has maintained its popularity, and there are currently more than fifty-five million copies of the Kent Family Chronicles in print worldwide.

Jakes followed the success of his first series with the North and South Trilogy, set before, during, and after the Civil War. The first volume,
North and South
, was published in 1982 and reaffirmed Jakes’s standing as a “master of the ancient art of story telling” (
The New York Times Book Review
). Following the lead of
North and South
, the other two books in the series,
Love and War
(1984) and
Heaven and Hell
(1987), were chart-topping bestsellers. The trilogy was also made into an ABC miniseries—a total of thirty hours of programming—starring Patrick Swayze. Produced by David L. Wolper for Warner Brothers
North and South
remains one of the highest-rated miniseries in television history.

The first three Kent Family Chronicles were also made into a television miniseries, produced by Universal Studios and aired on the Operation Prime Time network. Andrew Stevens starred as the patriarch of the fictional family. In one scene, Jakes himself appears as a scheming attorney sent to an untimely end by villain George Hamilton.

In addition to historical fiction, Jakes penned many works of science fiction, including the Brak the Barbarian series, published between 1968 and 1980. Following his success with the Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South Trilogy, Jakes continued writing historical fiction with the stand-alone novel
California Gold
and the Crown Family Saga (
Homeland
and its sequel,
American Dreams
).

Jakes remains active in the theater as an actor, director, and playwright. His adaptation of
A Christmas Carol
is widely produced by university and regional theaters, including the prestigious Alabama Shakespeare Festival and theaters as far away as Christchurch, New Zealand. He holds five honorary doctorates, the most recent of which is from his alma mater Ohio State University. He has filmed and recorded public service announcements for the American Library Association and hasreceived many other awards, including a dual Celebrity and Citizen’s Award from the White House Conference on Libraries and Information and the Cooper Medal from the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina. Jakes is a member of the Authors Guild, the Dramatists Guild, the PEN American Center, and Writers Guild of America East. He also serves on the board of the Authors Guild Foundation.

Jakes and his wife have four children and eleven grandchildren. After living for thirty-two years on a South Carolina barrier island, they now reside in Sarasota, Florida, where Jakes has resumed his volunteer work on behalf of theaters and libraries while he continues writing.