Understanding Blake Allmendinger's A History Of California Literature
I spent a solid afternoon pulling my copy off the shelf last month when someone asked me about California's literary canon. The book is massive, two thick volumes, and it does what most survey histories fail to do: it doesn't treat California literature as some regional afterthought to Eastern American letters. It takes the material seriously on its own terms. Allmendinger frames California's literary production as a continuum that starts well before statehood and stretches through the end of the twentieth century. Volume one covers the period from early indigenous oral traditions through the Gold Rush era and into the turn of the twentieth century. Volume two picks up around 1900 and runs through the late 1900s. The structure is chronological, but what makes it usable is the way he groups writers by movement, region, and theme rather than just listing names and publication dates. The scope is aggressive. He covers novelists, poets, essayists, playwrights, journalists, and sometimes works that wouldn't normally appear in a literary history at all — diaries, letters, newspaper serials, labor broadsides. That breadth is both the book's strength and the thing that makes it slow to get through if you approach it cover to cover. Most people use it as a reference text. I recommend approaching it that way.
How The Book Actually Works In Practice
The entry system is where this pays off. Each major writer or cluster of writers gets a substantive section with bibliographic notes, contextual framing, and critical assessment. The entries aren't just summaries. Allmendinger engages with the secondary scholarship and makes his own interpretive claims, which means you get both a survey and a point of view baked in. One thing that surprised me on rereading: his treatment of California's Spanish and Mexican-period writing gets more room than most scholars give it. He doesn't treat that era as a blank space before English-language literature arrived. That matters because a lot of older surveys do exactly that, and it distorts the picture. The index is detailed enough that you can trace a single theme across both volumes. I once spent about twenty minutes tracking how the concept of the "California myth" shows up in entries ranging from Mary Austin in the 1920s to Joan Didion in the 1960s. It held together better than I expected.
Common Pitfalls When Using This Book
The first issue people run into is that Allmendinger's coverage is uneven by necessity. Some writers get three pages. Others get thirty. This isn't sloppy editing. It's the unavoidable result of doing a single-volume or even two-volume survey of an entire state's literary output. If you're looking for a comprehensive critical study of a particular author, this won't be it. You'll need to go to the bibliographies at the end of each entry for that. A second issue: the book was published in the mid-1990s, which means anything after that window simply isn't covered. That includes the post-9/11 literary scene, the rise of digital literature, and a lot of contemporary voice that has emerged in the last thirty years. If your research needs coverage up to the present, you'll need supplemental sources.
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Where To Find It
You can pick up a used copy through Amazon, AbeBooks, or BookFinder. New copies are essentially unavailable from the publisher. Libraries in California tend to have copies on hand. UC Press holds the copyright and distribution rights, which is why you'll see references to them in citations. Academic libraries everywhere carry it. If you're a student, check whether your institution has it before buying a used set — the binding on some older hardcover editions can get soft around the spine after repeated library circulation. The bibliographic entries alone are useful. They point you toward primary sources and key critical works without requiring you to build a reading list from scratch. I've used them as starting points for coursework and research queries more times than I can count. Allmendinger also does a competent job handling the tension between California as a literary subject and California as a cultural brand. He doesn't pretend the state doesn't have a mythology problem. He just refuses to let the mythology replace the actual texts. That balance is harder to maintain than it sounds, and he gets it right more often than not.
If you're working in California studies, American regional literature, or West Coast cultural history, this is one of those books you don't revisit often but notice immediately when it's missing from your desk.
