To see this list as published in the San Francisco Chronicle on November 21, 1999, click here.
1. The land of little rain by Mary Austin
2. Beyond the hundredth meridian : John Wesley Powell and the second opening of the West by Wallace Stegner
3. Desert solitaire; a season in the wilderness by Edward Abbey
4. This house of sky : landscapes of a Western mind by Ivan Doig
5. Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell
6. The Western Trilogy by Bernard DeVoto
Across the wide Missouri
The course of empire
The year of decision, 1846
7. Assembling California by John McPhee
8. My first summer in the Sierra by John Muir
9. The white album by Joan Didion
10. City of quartz : excavating the future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis
11. Ordeal by hunger; the story of the Donner Party by George Rippey Stewart
12. Ishi in two worlds; a biography of the last wild Indian in North America by Theodora Kroeber
13. Americans and the California Dream (five volumes) by Kevin Starr
Americans and the California dream, 1850-1915
Inventing the dream : California through the Progressive Era
Material dreams : Southern California through the 1920's
Endangered dreams : the Great Depression in California
The dream endures : California enters the 1940s
(Embattled dreams : California in war and peace, 1940-1950, published after this list appeared)
(Coast of dreams : California on the edge, 1990-2003, published after this list appeared)
(Golden dreams : California in an age of abundance, 1950-1963, published after this list appeared)
14. Cadillac desert : the American West and its disappearing water by Marc Reisner
15. A Sand County almanac by Aldo Leopold
16. California: the great exception by Carey McWilliams
17. Arctic dreams : imagination and desire in a northern landscape by Barry Lopez
18. Farewell to Manzanar; a true story of Japanese American experience during and after the World War II internment by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston
19. Young men and fire by Norman MacLean
20. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee; an Indian history of the American West by Dee Brown
21. Bad land : an American romance by Jonathan Raban
22. The world rushed in : the California gold rush experience by J. S. Holliday
23. The art of eating; the collected gastronomical works of M. F. K. Fisher by M. F. K. Fisher
24. And the band played on : politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic by Randy Shilts
25. The big four; the story of Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker, and of the building of the Central Pacific by Oscar Lewis
26. The solace of open spaces by Gretel Ehrlich
27. In the spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matthiessen
28. Sea of Cortez; a leisurely journal of travel and research, with a scientific appendix comprising materials for a source book on the marine animals of the Panamic faunal province by John Steinbeck, Edward F. Ricketts
29. The practice of the wild : essays by Gary Snyder
30. Dancing at the edge of the world : thoughts on words, women, places by Ursula K. LeGuin
31. Zen mind, beginner's mind by Shunryu Suzuki
32. Great plains by Ian Frazier
33. The great plains by Walter Prescott Webb
34. Land of giants; the drive to the Pacific Northwest, 1750-1950 by David Sievert Lavender
35. Crazy Horse; the strange man of the Oglalas; a biography by Mari Sandoz
36. City of nets : a portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s by Otto Friedrich
37. Refuge : an unnatural history of family and place by Terry Tempest Williams
38. The content of our character : a new vision of race in America by Shelby Steele
39. High tide in Tucson : essays from now or never by Barbara Kingsolver
40. Winter by Rick Bass
41. Undaunted courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose
42. The woman warrior : memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston
43. The electric kool-aid acid test by Tom Wolfe
44. I lost it at the movies by Pauline Kael
45. The Devil's dictionary by Ambrose Bierce (electronic versions here)
46. Fear and loathing in Las Vegas : a savage journey to the heart of the American dream by Hunter S. Thompson
47. The book; on the taboo against knowing who you are by Alan Watts
48. Hunger of memory : the education of Richard Rodriguez : an autobiography by Richard Rodriguez
49. Caught inside : a surfer's year on the California coast by Daniel Duane
50. This boy's life : a memoir by Tobias Wolff
51. Books in my baggage; adventures in reading and collecting by Lawrence Clark Powell
52. The California dream edited by Dennis Hale by Jonathan Eisen
53. Men to match my mountains; the opening of the Far West 1840-1900 by Irving Stone
54. Love and will by Rollo May
55. The language of the goddess : unearthing the hidden symbols of western civilization by Marija Gimbutas
56. The air-conditioned nightmare by Henry Miller
57. T. rex and the crater of doom by Walter Alvarez
58. The way to rainy mountain by N. Scott Momaday
59. The man who walked through time by Colin Fletcher
60. John Barleycorn by Jack London
61. Strangers from a different shore : a history of Asian Americans by Ronald Takaki
62. Dirty truths : reflections on politics, media, ideology, conspiracy, ethnic life and class power by Michael Parenti
63. The executioner's song by Norman Mailer
64. The legacy of conquest : the unbroken past of the American West by Patricia Nelson Limerick
65. Living up the street : narrative recollections by Gary Soto
66. The captive mind by Czeslaw Milosz
67. California fault : searching for the spirit of state along the San Andreas by Thurston Clarke
68. Lonesome traveler by Jack Kerouac
69. The Ohlone way : Indian life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area by Malcolm Margolin
70. Ansel Adams, an autobiography by Ansel Adams
71. The great thirst : Californians and water : a history by Norris Hundley
72. Hole in the sky : a memoir by William Kittredge
73. Twentieth century pleasures : prose on poetry by Robert Hass
74. Skid Road : an informal portrait of Seattle by Murray Morgan
75. My wilderness : the Pacific West by William O. Douglas
76. Klamath knot : explorations of myth and evolution by David Rains Wallace
77. Sweet promised land by Robert Laxalt
78. History of the Sierra Nevada by Francis P. Farquhar
79. The sexual outlaw : a documentary : a non-fiction account, with commentaries, of three days and nights in the sexual underground by John Rechy
80. Additional dialogue; letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962 by Dalton Trumbo
81. Final cut : dreams and disaster in the making of Heaven's gate by Steven Bach
82. The decline of the Californios; a social history of the Spanish-speaking Californians, 1846-1890 by Leonard Pitt
83. "It's your misfortune and none of my own" : a history of the American West by Richard White
84. Communalism: from its origins to the twentieth century by Kenneth Rexroth
85. I, candidate for governor: and how I got licked by Upton Sinclair
86. And a voice to sing with : a memoir by Joan Baez
87. Miles from nowhere : tales from America's contemporary frontier by Dayton Duncan
88. Winter in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan
89. The voice of the desert, a naturalist's interpretation by Joseph Wood Krutch
90. Where the wasteland ends; politics and transcendence in postindustrial society by Theodore Roszak
91. Traveling light by Bill Barich
92. The frenzy of renown : fame & its history by Leo Braudy
93. Stepping westward by Sallie Tisdale
94. Money and class in America : notes and observations on our civil religion by Lewis H. Lapham
95. Coming of age in California : personal essays by Gerald Haslam
96. Sinclair Lewis, an American life by Mark Schorer
97. Dashiell Hammett, a life by Diane Johnson
98. The town that fought to save itself by Orville Schell
99. Hide and seek; a continuing journey by Jessamyn West
100. Anybody's gold by Joseph Henry Jackson