California Authors Night - 2003 Edition        (Event photos at the bottom)

The eleventh annual California Authors night was produced by the Pleasant Hill Recreation & Park District in cooperation with the CWC Mt. Diablo Branch at the Winslow Center. Three performers portrayed these authors, revealing their struggles, successes, and those who influenced them.

Dorothy Parker is best known for her quote, "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” She was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine and one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table. Dorothy epitomized the liberated woman of the 1920's; her writing was light, witty and sometimes cynical. It was she who said, when Calvin Coolidge died, "How can they tell?"  Dorothy wrote The Big Blonde, short story of the year in 1929, and several volumes of poems. Although we think of her as the consummate New Yorker, she qualifies as a California author because she spent 30 years in Hollywood writing for the movies. She will be performed by Pat Edwards, a former president of the Mt. Diablo Branch of CWC, who portrays Gertrude Stein, Helen Hunt Jackson, Lillian Hellman, Gertrude Atherton, Jessica Mitford and M.F.K. Fisher on the road throughout Northern California.

Alice Tisdale Hobart, the first white woman to see some areas of Manchuria, spent nearly 16 years in China before she and her husband faced death at the hands of the Communists. Her experiences prompted a best-selling novel, Oil for the Lamps of China, (twice filmed) and its sequel, Their Own Country, written at Rodgers Ranch. While living in Pleasant Hill she also wrote The Cup and the Sword. Retitled as This Earth Is Mine, the movie starred Rock Hudson. Hobart battled acute shyness and a physical disability, yet she traveled widely and wrote some 13 books. In these she challenged big business, dealt with international marriage, grappled with medical care financing, and in her final novel (1963) hoped for the possibility of "greater understanding between East and West.” Author and journalist Beverly Lauderdale will become Hobart. Previously she portrayed Mary Austin, Jessamyn West, Kathleen Norris and Mary Hallock Foote.

John Steinbeck won the 1962 Nobel Prize for literature. He made a conscious decision to become a writer as a teenager, though he never sought fame, in the conventional sense. In responding to a request for biographical information he once said, "Feel free to make up as many facts about me as you need . . . I can't remember how much of me is real and how much I have invented.” Steinbeck used his coarse and boorish public persona as a way of shielding his shy, insecure and sensitive nature. Most of all he wanted to be left alone to write. As for his supposed ‘political activism,' he said, "I just don't like to see people hungry, hurt, or unnecessarily sad . . . it's about as simple as that.” His most famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath, won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize. A Salinas native, he set many of his short stories and novels in California, such as East of Eden and The Pastures of Heaven. Actor Dave Pinkham is very active in local theater. He has become Herb Caen, Dashiell Hammett and William Saroyan for past Author Nights.

February 27th, 2003

Proceeds will be donated to the annual CWC Mt. Diablo Branch Young Writers Contest for Contra Costa Middle School Students.

 The Director - Liz Pentacoff

 

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