‘Dear Los Angeles’ is a Unique History of Los Angeles

Share

Los Angeles has hundreds of years of history and so many different people have come through with their own stories. A diary entry can tell so much about a person and a place. In this spirit, editor David Kipen put together the collection Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018.

The book is organized by the day the entry was written and follows the order from January 1st to December 31st. Entries can be from any time period between 1542 to 2018 and all tell some aspect of the story of Los Angeles. It’s fascinating to see that some days in Los Angeles can have similar feelings, and even three hundred years apart some frustrations in the city continue. Dear Los Angeles features some pretty famous names, including Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Simone De Beauvoir, Zora Neal Hurston, John Lennon, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a ton of other famous names.

Dear Los Angeles made me homesick in a serious way. The book is such a delight for someone who loves to discover the history of their home, or someone who has left Los Angeles and still misses it.

Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018 is available now from Modern Library.

 

Share

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.