Houston, James D. 1933-

PERSONAL: Born November 10, 1933, in San Francisco, CA; son of Albert Dudley and Alice Loretta Houston; married Jeanne Toyo Wakatsuki, 1957; children: Corinne, Joshua, Gabrielle. Education: San Jose State College (now University), B.A., 1956; Stanford University, M.A., 1962.

ADDRESSES: Home—Santa Cruz, CA; fax 408-476-2845. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Cabrillo College, Aptos, CA, instructor in English, 1962-64; guitar instructor in Santa Cruz, CA, 1964-66; Stanford University, Stanford, CA, lecturer in English, 1967-68; University of California, Santa Cruz, lecturer in writing, 1969-88, visiting professor in literature, 1989-93. Writer-in-residence, Villa Montalvo, Saratoga, CA, fall, 1980, and spring, 1992; distinguished visiting writer, University of Hawaii at Manoa, spring, 1983; visiting writer, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, fall, 1985; Allen T. Gilliland Chair in telecommunications, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, 1985; writer-in-residence, Centrum Foundation, Port Townsend, WA, 1992; visiting writer, University of Oregon, Eugene, 1994; visiting writer, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 1999; writer-in-residence, German Federal Reserve Bank, 2002; Lurie Chair and distinguished visiting professor of creative writing, San Jose State University, 2006. Member of California Council for the Humanities, 1983-87; Squaw Valley Community of Writers, board of directors, 2001—. Consultant to California Legacy Series at Heyday Books and to Lost and Found Sound, National Public Radio; Pacific Rim Film Festival, steering committee; Tandy Beal Dance Company, advisory board. Member, Kir-iyama Book Prize Advisory Council, University of California at Davis Pacific Rim Humanities Center advisory board. Military service: U.S. Air Force, 1957-60; became lieutenant.

MEMBER: PEN Center West, PEN/Faulkner Foundation (member, National Advisory Board on Writers in the Schools).

AWARDS, HONORS: U.S. Air Force Short Story Contest, winner, 1959; Wallace Stegner creative writing fellow at Stanford University, 1966-67; Joseph Henry Jackson Award, San Francisco Foundation, 1967, for Gig; University of California faculty research grant, 1972; Humanitas Prize, 1976, and Christopher Award, both for screenplay Farewell to Manzanar; National Endowment for the Arts creative writing grant, 1976-77; National Endowment for the Arts small press grant, 1977; travel grant to Asia, Arts America Program, fall, 1981 and 1984; American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1983, for Californians: Searching for the Golden State; special award from Hawaii International Film Festival, Honolulu, 1989; story award from Library of Congress/PEN Syndicated Fiction Project, 1990; writer’s residency, Bellagio, Italy, from Rockefeller Foundation, 1995; American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1999, for The Last Paradise; distinguished achievement award, Western Literature Association, 1999; Carey McWilliams Award, California Studies Association, 2000; California Book Awards silver medal, the Commonwealth Club, 2001, for The Literature of California: Writings from the Golden State; award of excellence in general Hawaiian culture and award of excellence in nonfiction, Hawai’i Book Publishers Association, both 2005, both for Hawaiian Son.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Between Battles, Dial (New York, NY), 1968.

Gig, Dial (New York, NY), 1969, Creative Arts Books (Berkeley, CA), 1988.

A Native Son of the Golden West, Dial (New York, NY), 1971.

Continental Drift, Knopf (New York, NY), 1978, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1996.

Love Life, Knopf (New York, NY), 1985.

The Last Paradise, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 1998.

Snow Mountain Passage, Knopf (New York, NY), 2001.

Bird of Another Heaven, Knopf (New York, NY), 2007.

NONFICTION

(With Ben Finney) Surfing: The Sport of Hawaiian Kings, C.E. Tuttle (Rutland, VT), 1966, revised edition published as Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport, Pomegranate Artbooks (San Francisco, CA), 1996.

(With wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston) Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience during and after the World War II Internment (also see below), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1973, new edition, 2002.

(With John R. Brodie) Open Field (biography), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1974.

Three Songs for My Father (essays), Capra Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1974.

(With J.W. Houston and John Korty) Farewell to Man-zanar (screenplay), Universal Pictures and MCA-TV, 1976.

Californians: Searching for the Golden State, Knopf (New York, NY), 1982, 10th anniversary edition, Otter B Books (Santa Cruz, CA) 1992.

“One Can Think about Life after the Fish Is in the Canoe” and Other Coastal Sketches, Capra Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1985.

The Men in My Life and Other More or Less True Recollections of Kinship (personal stories), Creative Arts Books (Berkeley, CA), 1987.

In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey, Mercury House (San Francisco, CA), 1997.

(With Eddie Kamae) Hawaiian Son: The Life and Music of Eddie Kamae, Ai Pohaku Press (Honolulu, HI), 2004.

SCRIPTWRITER; “HAWAIIAN LEGACY FOUNDATION” FILM SERIES; CULTURAL DOCUMENTARIES

Li’a: The Legacy of the Hawaiian Man, 1988.

Listen to the Forest, 1991.

The Hawaiian Way: The Art and Family Tradition of Slack-Key Music, 1993.

Words, Earth, and Aloha: The Sources of Hawaiian Music 1995.

Luther Makekau: One Kine Hawaiian Man, 1997.

Hawaiian Voices: Bridging Past to Present, 1998.

The Sons of Hawai’i: A Sound, a Band, a Legend, 2000.

EDITOR

Writing from the Inside (textbook), Addison Wesley (Reading, MA) 1973.

(With Gerald Haslam) California Heartland: Writings from the Great Central Valley, Capra Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1978.

West Coast Fiction: Modern Writing from California, Oregon, and Washington, Bantam (New York, NY), 1979.

(With Jack Hicks, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Al Young) The Literature of California: Writings from the Golden State, Volume 1: Native American Beginnings to 1945, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2000.

OTHER

The Adventures of Charlie Bates (short stories), Capra Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1973, enlarged edition published as Gasoline: The Automotive Adventures of Charlie Bates, 1980.

Where Light Takes Its Color from the Sea: A California Notebook, Heyday Books (Berkeley, CA), 2008.

Also author of a teleplay Barrio, with Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, developed by National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Contributor to books, including Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West, edited by Michael Kowalewski, Cambridge University Press, 1996; The Kindness of Strangers: Tales of Fate and Fortune on the Road, edited by Don George, Lonely Planet Publications, 2003; and California Uncovered: Stories for the Twenty-first Century, edited by Chitra Divakaruni, William Justice, and James Quay, California Council for Humanities/Heyday Books, 2005. Contributor of short stories and articles to periodicals, including GQ, Los Angeles Times, Manoa, Mother Jones, New Yorker, New York Times, Playboy, Ploughshares, Rethinking History, Rolling Stone, San Francisco Focus, Santa Monica Review, and ZYZZYVA: The Journal of West Coast Writers and Artists.

SIDELIGHTS: James D. Houston is a native Californian whose works of fiction and nonfiction reflect his interest in the literature and people of this region. One of his earliest works, Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience during and after the World War II Internment, coauthored with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, details her experiences as a young girl growing up during World War II. In 1942 Jeanne and her family were uprooted from their California home and forcibly evacuated to an internment camp in California for Japanese Americans, most of whom were native-born citizens of the United States. “Houston and her husband have recorded a tale of many complexities in a straightforward manner, a tale remarkably lacking in either self-pity or solemnity,” Dorothy Rabinowitz commented in the Saturday Review. A New York Times Book Review critic concluded that Farewell to Manzanar is “a dramatic, telling account of one of the most reprehensible events in the history of America’s treatment of its minorities.”

Californians: Searching for the Golden State, which received the American Book Award, is structured as a travel narrative and contains interviews with various residents, including an ecological activist, a playwright, a winemaker, and a psychic. “Taken together these lives make a prism through which the multifaceted California dream can be viewed at every angle,” wrote Wilson Library Bulletin reviewer Jeanne Short. Critics praised Houston’s objective, balanced, thorough handling of his subject. Boston Globe contributor Mark Muro wrote: “California unhinges us, makes us lose all proportion. But in Californians…., James D. Houston gives us something different, for he summons us to join him in a reexploration of his home state.” National Review contributor Lee Hopkins commented: “A genial, lyrical, and rational man, James Houston avoids extremes, and in his fair-minded, very equitable way is the ideal observer and chronicler.” Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Bill Stout concluded: “Whether in a Hollywood film studio or an Asian grocery in San Francisco, [Houston] found himself fascinated by the swirl of this wondrous place we share, and so often fail to notice or even try to understand. His journey makes one want to try harder; for a book, it is difficult to imagine anything better that could be said.”

One of Houston’s most widely reviewed novels is Love Life, a contemporary work set in northern California. The narrator is Holly Doyle, a wife, mother, and occasional country and western singer. On her thirty-second birthday Holly discovers that Grover, her husband of ten years, is having an affair with a twenty-year-old feminist. Holly reacts by flying to New York, where she intends to get revenge by having a fling with a former lover. Instead she has a five-minute affair with a stranger that activates a desire to repair her marriage. Shortly after her return home, California is hit with a torrential rainstorm, and the family’s enforced isolation enables Holly and Grover to reconcile.

“This may sound like the stuff of another ‘divorce novel,’ as the genre seems to be known, but there is much more to Love Life than that,” wrote Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, who added: “They’re ordinary [characters] but Houston makes them interesting, because they talk and think in ways that we immediately recognize as authentic.” Elizabeth Chamish wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that Holly’s “is not a new story; there is no surprise ending, no mystery, but an admirable unraveling of how she gets from here to there.”

Several reviewers commented that one of the novel’s distinguishing characteristics is the engaging and convincing quality of Holly’s narration. New Republic contributor Jamie Baylis, for example, observed: “The pat story line is salvaged… by Holly’s first-person narrative. A spirited, sturdy, intuitive woman, she turns to wide-ranging introspection as she recounts this ‘Unidentified Flying Object’ stage, when obstacles seemed to appear from every direction.” Publishers Weekly contributor Sybil Steinberg noted: “The special joy of this warm and wonderful book is the narrator, Holly, whose voice… rings with resonating implications.”

New York Times Book Review contributor Sheila Ballantine, on the other hand, detected random shifts in Holly’s voice from first to third person. These inconsistencies, Ballantine claimed, “seem to reflect uncertainty on the part of a man who has decided to speak through a female persona. They undermine the integrity of an otherwise compelling character.” Chamish’s conclusion was similar: “As often as it is accurate, fair and likable, Houston’s female perspective is also weak, detached, and essentially untrue.” On the whole, however, critics praised the novel. Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Taffy Cannon wrote: “Houston’s characters are carefully drawn, intelligent, funny and beguiling. Love Life is a charming novel, an insightful and marvelously fresh examination of a good marriage in sudden disarray.” Baylis wrote: “[Holly] expresses her worldview with such wit and force that it’s hard to resist being taken in. James Houston’s foray into the female psyche is entirely convincing to this reviewer (a woman), who bristled only once.” Detroit News critic Ruth Pollack Coughlin urged, “Try Love Life. Houston is a storyteller’s storyteller. This tale is told by Holly Doyle and it is much to Houston’s credit that the voice rings true—no easy feat for a male writer. Houston’s people are enormously real and alive; you can’t help but be with them at every step.”

A frequent visitor to Hawaii, Houston received a second American Book Award for The Last Paradise, a “lyrical novel, effectively combining a mystery story, a love story, and a glowing tapestry of Hawaiian life and culture,” observed Booklist contributor GraceAnne A. DeCandido. The work concerns troubled Vietnam veteran Travis Doyle, an insurance claims adjustor who is sent to the Big Island to investigate a fire at a geothermal drilling site. Once there he visits Angel Sakai, his first love, and gains a greater understanding of the islanders’ views on ecology and spirituality. Writing in Library Journal, Andrea Caron Kempf praised the author’s “masterly handling of the relationship between people’s lives and the forces of nature.”

Houston is also the author of Snow Mountain Passage, a novel about the infamous Donner party, a group of early immigrants to California who were stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846-47. Houston’s telling of these events centers on James Frazier Reed, one of the leaders of the party, who was exiled somewhere in Nevada after he killed a mule driver during a dispute. Half of the chapters are from a third-person perspective, centered on Reed, while the other half are in the form of fictional “Trail Notes” composed by Reed’s daughter, Patty. Eight years old during the crossing, Patty speaks from the vantage point of an eighty-five-year-old woman living in Santa Cruz in the 1920s and looking back upon her family’s ordeal. While her “Trail Note” are entirely fictional, Houston feels a personal connection to the material: since 1962 he has lived in the elderly Victorian home where Patty Reed spent the last ten years of her life.

Critics generally praised Snow Mountain Passage. An Atlantic Monthly reviewer appreciated Houston’ “sure sense of place” and “clear-eyed view of humanity’s heart of darkness,” while Dave Madden of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, who called Snow Mountain Passage “Houston’s most compelling novel,” cited “its sense of narrative sweep and luminous prose.” Roy Parvin of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “Snow Mountain Passage deserves room beside Larry Mc-Murtry Lonesome Dove on the shelf of modern Western classics.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer, meanwhile, wrote that Houston “presents a compelling portrait of a man who was a mixture of renegade and hero.” Carolyn See, writing in the Washington Post Book World, called Snow Mountain Passage “a dignified, powerful narrative of our shared American destiny.”

Houston’s critically acclaimed novel Bird of Another Heaven examines a man’s search for his heritage, the settling of the American West, and the final days of the Hawaiian monarchy. In the work, Bay Area talk show host Sheridan Brody learns that he is the great-grandson of Nani Keala, a woman of Hawaiian and California Indian descent whose father helped John Sutter construct a fort in the Sacramento Valley. Keala later served as the consort to David Kalakaua, the last king of Hawaii, who died under mysterious circumstances during an 1891 visit to San Francisco. “Here was a multi-lingual, multi-cultural woman of the late 19th century whose adventurous life seemed to encompass two seemingly disparate realms,” Houston told an interviewer on the Borzoi Reader Online. “I think that’s what drew me ever deeper into the material—a singular woman, an enigmatic king, the chance to explore, in one narrative, a formative era in two parts of the world that have for so long intrigued me, my home region, California, and my second home, Hawai’i.” Writing in Booklist, Brad Hooper stated that the author draws “meaningful parallels between historical and present-day events,” and Entertainment Weekly critic Aine Doyle observed that the work “richly reconceives the demise of the Hawaiian monarchy.” A critic in Kirkus Reviews described Houston’s Bird of Another Heaven as “compelling evidence that he’s one of the best historical novelists working today.”

Houston once told CA: “An abiding belief in the power of words has been part of my inheritance. But when I first started writing, for the high school paper, this was the farthest thing from my conscious mind. For quite some time the motive was simply to get a story told, hoping to see it in print, and later, hoping to get some money for the effort. As the years went by, writing turned out to be good deal more than that. I have come to rely upon it as work with a spiritual dimension. In Zen terms you might call it a form of practice. The daily struggle to pursue a line of meaning becomes a kind of path that allows you to travel both outward and inward.”

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Fine, David, and Paul Skenazy, editors, San Francisco in Fiction, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1995.

Kowalewski, Michael, Updating the Literary West, Texas Christian University Press (Forth Worth, TX), 1997.

PERIODICALS

American Studies International, February, 1999, Bernard Mergen, review of Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West, pp. 95-97.

Atlantic Monthly, April, 2001, review of Snow Mountain Passage, p. 107.

Booklist, March 1, 1998, GraceAnne A. DeCandido, review of The Last Paradise, p. 1092; April 1, 2001, John Green, review of Snow Mountain Passage, p. 1451; February 15, 2007, Brad Hooper, review of Bird of Another Heaven, p. 34.

Boston Globe, November 14, 1982, Mark Muro, review of Californians: Searching for the Golden State.

California History, summer-fall, 2001, Gerald W. Haslam, review of The Literature of California: Writings from the Golden State, pp. 142-143.

Christian Science Monitor, December 9, 1985, Elizabeth Chamish, review of Love Life.

Detroit News, October 6, 1985, Ruth Pollack Coughlin, review of Love Life.

Entertainment Weekly, March 23, 2007, Aine Doyle, review of Bird of Another Heaven, p. 66.

Glamour, October, 1985, Joy Gould Boyum, review of Love Life, pp. 224-225.

Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2007, review of Bird of Another Heaven, p. 43.

Library Journal, October 15, 1982, review of Californians, p. 1999; September 15, 1985, Marion Hanscom, review of Love Life, p. 93; August, 1987, David Sowd, review of The Men in My Life and Other More or Less True Recollections of Kinship, p. 120; February 1, 1997, review of Continental Drift, p. 112; May 15, 1997, William L. Wuerch, review of In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey, p. 85; February 15, 1998, Andrea Caron Kempf, review of The Last Paradise, p. 170; January 1, 2007, Shalini Miskelly, review of Bird of Another Heaven, p. 93.

Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2001, Anthony Day, review of Snow Mountain Passage, p. E-1; May 22, 2001, Michelle Huneven, “Writer Revisits the Tragic Fate of the Donner Party,” p. 1.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 20, 1983, Bill Stout, review of Californians; November 3, 1985, Taffy Cannon, review of Love Life.

National Review, September 30, 1983, Lee Hopkins, review of Californians, pp. 1222-1223.

New Republic, November 11, 1985, Jamie Baylis, review of Love Life, pp. 38-39.

New York Times, April 20, 1980, review of Continental Drift, p. 39.

New York Times Book Review, January 13, 1974, review of Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience during and after the World War II Internment; April 20, 1980, review of Continental Drift, p. 39; September 29, 1985, Sheila Ballantine, review of Love Life; December 11, 1988, review of Gig, p. 42.

Publishers Weekly, September 10, 1982, review of Californians, p. 71; July 12, 1985, Sybil Steinberg, review of Love Life, p. 46; June 12, 1987, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of The Men in My Life and Other More or Less True Recollections of Kinship, pp. 78-79; April 14, 1997, review of In the Ring of Fire, p. 68; March 19, 2001, review of Snow Mountain Passage, p. 77; December 18, 2006, review of Bird of Another Heaven, p. 39.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 2001, Dave Madden, review of Snow Mountain Passage, p. 219.

Sacramento Bee, April 17, 2007, Dixie Reid, “Wild for the West: James D. Houston’s New Epic Mines California and Hawaii History to Turn Legend into Literature.”

San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 2001, Roy Parvin, “California Dreamers: Donner Party Novel Covers New Territory,” p. 5; February 20, 2005, Annie Na-kao, “Biographer Is Attuned to Hawaiian Music,” review of Hawaiian Son: The Life and Music of Eddie Kamae.

Saturday Review, November 6, 1973, Dorothy Rabinowitz, review of Farewell to Manzanar.

School Library Journal, November, 2001, Lynn Nutwell, review of Snow Mountain Passage, p. 192.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), July 24, 1988, review of Gig, p. 6.

Washington Post, October 2, 1985, Jonathan Yardley, review of Love Life.

Washington Post Book World, April 15, 2001, Carolyn See, “California Dreaming,” p. 3.

Wilson Library Bulletin, January, 1983, Jeanne Short, review of Californians, p. 437.

World and I, September, 2001, Annick Smith, review of Snow Mountain Passage, p. 238.

ONLINE

Borzoi Reader Online,http://www.randomhouse.com/ (September 25, 2007), “James D. Houston.”

James D. Houston Home Page,http://www.jamesdhouston.com (September 25, 2007).

Waterbridge Review,http://www.waterbridgereview.org/ (November, 2004) Gail Tsukiyama, “Conversations: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston.”