“Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.”
—Howard Luck Gossage
About 50 years ago, I was sitting in a college lecture hall as a portly, charismatic scholar was lecturing on the idea that the Western half of the country should have its own cultural canon. While acknowledging the cultures of Indigenous people and Spanish-speaking colonists, Kevin Starr was explaining that the first wave of settlers had brought with them the customs and religions of their European homelands, yet, little by little, a new American viewpoint had emerged.
I had been a prep school kid exposed to Shakespeare but also to Melville, Hawthorne, and Dickinson. Somehow, I sensed that those books lay within a walled garden. The chauvinism of the Wild West—cowboys!—and the frontier romanticism of Frederick Jackson Turner were not an inspiration.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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But I thought Starr had a point. This Western canon should include literature by writers like John Muir, Mary Austin, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Nathanael West, and John Steinbeck (and many others I would come to discover); music by the Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix; works by artists like Dorothea Lange, Maynard Dixon, and Ansel Adams; and contributions from subcultures—rock climbing, hiking, moviemaking, surfing—with their own heroes and literature; as well as historical records, like the diaries of the Portolá expedition. These were the components of a different tradition.
Some 40 years after that lecture, a group of us decided to act on Starr’s thesis by creating a publication—Alta Journal—which you hold in your hands.
In the interim, I had encountered other people who were inspired by a similar vision.
I worked for Jann Wenner, who cofounded Rolling Stone. Jann’s focus was music and celebrity—the beat of the counterculture. But it was a classic startup. Innovative, fun, sometimes hilarious, it attracted first-rate writers, editors, and photographers. Made a dent in the world.
Terry McDonell was the editorial brain of Outside, which avoided the service edit of Backpacker in favor of a literary roster that included Tom McGuane, Tim Cahill, Jim Harrison, and many other young talents and future stars. (For McDonell’s recent writing, see his article “Long Live Print.”)
And you can’t work in the publishing world unless you’ve also collaborated with terrific art directors. I’ve learned so much from Roger Black, Dugald Stermer, Mike Salisbury, and Alta’s creative director, John Goecke.
So, a group of us founded Alta. It was a startup. Don’t let anybody tell you that at the core of a startup stands a young genius. If you can’t bring people more skilled than yourself together, then it will never get off the ground. The secret of a startup is the ability to attract talent. John Doerr, my former colleague at Kleiner Perkins, used to say, “The venture business is not a part of the finance world; it’s more like a recruiting firm.”
Without our team—editorial director Blaise Zerega and his colleagues—the Alta venture would never have become what it is today. We also thought it made sense to recognize our predecessors. That’s why our masthead has a section called “Our Inspiration,” a list of tremendous writers and other creative people who deserve to be included in the Western canon.
It became apparent after we started Alta that the West was no better than the East. The creative impulse, the way brilliance emerges and is recognized, is almost always the same over geographies, across genders, and through the centuries.
We came to realize that our different life experiences were just one undervalued experience. Many other communities also felt excluded or overlooked by the Eastern perspective.
We wanted, then, as editors, to cast a wide net and to make certain that all the components of the Western way of life would have a home at Alta in all of its manifestations: print, website, live events, and social media. We’ve worked hard to create such a place, where the unique histories and viewpoints of all these multitudes can be discovered, understood, and celebrated.
This issue’s “25 Books That Define California” is our latest response to Starr’s call for a Western canon—in this case, a literary one. We surveyed authors, critics, and booksellers across the state and were surprised and delighted by their favorite novels. The roster includes books not just by Chandler, Didion, and West but also by the likes of Walter Mosley, Amy Tan, and Helena María Viramontes. It’s a surprising, provocative list—admittedly incomplete, as all such projects are—and I’d like to think Starr would approve of our effort.
Do you agree with our list of novels? I’d love to hear from you. Write to letters@altaonline.com.•
Will Hearst is the editor and publisher of Alta Journal, which he founded in 2017. He is the board chair of Hearst, one of the nation’s largest diversified media and information companies. Hearst is a grandson of company founder William Randolph Hearst.
