![]() ![]() In various guises California would play the lead role in Mr. Their story kindled an interest in treks and quests that intensified when he met his future wife, whose family had immigrated to California from Japan. James Dudley Houston was born in San Francisco, where his parents had migrated from Quanah, Tex., a small town near the Texas panhandle. Houston later explored Hawaii in several novels and in nonfiction works on surfing and Hawaiian music. A passion for that state and its culture was born when his father, after being stationed there with the Navy, brought home a ukulele and a steel guitar, and Mr. Houston evoked, with pinpoint precision, its redwood forests, farms and wild coastline, as well as its restless population of faddists and dreamers. ![]() The state provided the setting for nearly all his novels and the material for the nonfiction work “Californians: Searching for the Golden State,” and Mr. Houston lived his entire life in California, most of it in Santa Cruz. The cause was complications of lymphoma, said his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. Houston, who captured the promise, the harshness and the sheer beauty of California in novels like “Continental Drift” and “Snow Mountain Passage” and in nonfiction works like “Farewell to Manzanar,” about a World War II internment camp for the Japanese, died on Thursday at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |