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California

Wallace Stegner to VQR Editor, 1938

Wallace Stegner to VQR Editor, 1938

When he sent this letter to VQR Editor Lambert Davis, Wallace Stegner was in his late twenties and just starting to establish himself in national publications. From 1938 to 1943, he published three short stories and three book reviews in VQR. In 194 [...]

Wayne Thiebuad, San Francisco West Side Ridge, 2001. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36”.  (ART ©WAYNE THIEBAUD / LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY. COURTESY OF SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, WASHINGTON DC / ART RESOURCE, NY)

Fifteen Takes on California

California as land’s end, world’s end: It collapses underneath the weight of such a reading, as it must. It reveals the limits of our history—demographic history, social history, history of technology, our sense of this place as final landscape, last territory on the continent, where we face ourselves because there is nowhere to turn.

Dislocation on Pacific Coast Highway

We had been going much too fast to make a perfect scan, yet the camera, in attempting to stitch together the vertical slices, had made a very interestingly distorted hash of the scene, one which somehow captured the architecture, the street traffic, and also the uneasy mood of the photographer.

Illustration by Raquel Aparicio

My Life in the New Age

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked ••• angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connectionto the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .” —Allen Ginsberg, “Howl, [...]

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