Los Angeles in the 1930s returns to print an invaluable document of Depression-era Los Angeles, illuminating a pivotal moment in L.A.’s history, when writers like Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were creating the images and associations—and the mystique—for which the City of Angels is still known. Many books in one, Los Angeles in the 1930s is both a genial guide and an addictively readable history, revisiting the Spanish colonial period, the Mexican period, the brief California Republic, and finally American sovereignty. It is also a compact coffee table book of dazzling monochrome photography. These whose haunting visions suggest the city we know today and illuminate the booms and busts that marked L.A.’s past and continue to shape its future.

"Speed, mobility, freedom: these governed the aesthetics of the "city of the future" as it spread its arterials across the Southern California landscape. If ever a city and a decade seemed meant for each other, it was Los Angeles and the streamlined '30s. The gloom of the Depression did little to curb the dynamism of this optimistic, greedy, sprawling metropolis. The Hollywood dream machine mirrored the aspirations of millions of Americans - a single-family home and yard, the independence of a private car on uncluttered streets, and the latest household conveniences. And L.A.'s built environment reflected the dreams, realizing in fact what the film sets offered in fantasy, with imagery ranging from up-to-date recreations of popular period styles to the stripped-classic monumentality of public buildings, and on toward the future in the sleek Moderne of curved corners, fluidly bent neon and metal tubing, and sculpted surfaces of stucco and glass brick ... Attention is focused on the types of architectural imagery used in commercial, public, and residential buildings..."--Page 4 of cover.

Kevin Starr is the foremost chronicler of the California dream. In Material Dreams, he turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920's, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles.

"The most detailed study ever published of Los Angeles' most critical period. . . . An invaluable aid to my understanding of this city."—David Brodsly, author of L.A. Freeway

After World War I, the US was flooded with newspapers, magazines, radio stations and movies. Many feared serious books would disappear altogether. The concern caused a boom in fine editions, valued for beauty, craftsmanship or rarity, rather than content, and this is their story.