Los Gatos was just over the Coast Range from Carmel and Big Sur. I also spent time in Carmel and Big Sur during the ‘50s, although I was definitely too young to be hanging out with beatniks. My mom, however, was a kind of ‘20s bohemian at heart, which helped me pick up on the beat Zeitgeist. Carmel was essentially settled by turn-of-the-century bohemians right after the 1906 earthquake.

Despite spending time in Northern California bohemian and beatnik haunts, however, I remained essentially a Westside Los Angeles kid. Most of what I really knew of small American towns I learned reading Sinclair Lewis, and then Willa Cather, who, because of my mother's friendship with her, was my godmother. My mom never had any money to give me, but she did give me the letters Willa Cather had written to her letters which academics had been pestering her for. The letters are now at the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma. I didn't get rich from the sale, but I had enough to live for two or three months.

In Los Gatos as a young man, my grandfather Moshe introduced me to the written word. His were much more political than literary or philosophical concerns, and I'm sure he would not have been at home with beatniks. But his influence on me was great. Moshe faithfully read two publications all his life, whatever part of the world he found himself in. He had the daily and Sunday New York Times flown in (he was proud of the fact that the New York Times itself had commended him on being one of their most loyal customers) and he never missed an issue of The Nation. He explained to me that The Nation had begun as an abolitionist journal, which of course piqued my interest because there were increasing signs in the ‘50s of the great civil rights struggles that came to a head in the ‘60s. When Moshe first came to the United States from Palestine in 1916, he fell in with the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, whom he revered with almost the same passion he revered the American flag, which he did with an immigrant's uncritical gratefulness. But even "good" Americans knew about Upton Sinclair and Jack London; these were the two writers who radicalized whole generations of Americans and millions more around the globe.

I definitely was one of those who came to the Left as a result of reading. And I still believe in the primacy of the written word; most everything of value I ever learned was in printed form. The writers I was attracted to, beginning with Mark Twain and Jack London, and continuing on through Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck and Carey McWilliams, and with diversions abroad to folks like Sean O'Casey and Romain Rolland, were all men of the Left. You couldn't be worth your salt as a writer unless you were a critic of the establishment. That seems to be the nature of the beast, with the one great exception of poet Robinson Jeffers, but I have written of them elsewhere so I will not dwell on that matter here.~~click here to continue