{"id":5630,"date":"2014-01-09T20:07:52","date_gmt":"2014-01-10T02:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5630"},"modified":"2014-01-09T20:07:52","modified_gmt":"2014-01-10T02:07:52","slug":"tom-wolfes-california-in-the-golden-state-the-great-writer-first-chronicled-the-social-changes-that-would-transform-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5630","title":{"rendered":"Tom Wolfe\u2019s California In the Golden State, the great writer first chronicled the social changes that would transform America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/2012\/22_4_urb-tom-wolfes-california.html\">Michael Anton<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>And without Wolfe, we would not understand California\u2014or the California-ized modern world. At the time of his most frequent visits, the state was undergoing a profound change, one that affects it to this day and whose every aspect has been exported throughout the country and the globe. Both have become much more like California over the last 40 years, even as California has drifted away from its old self, and Wolfe has chronicled and explained it all.<br \/>&nbsp;<br \/>&nbsp;It started by accident. Wolfe was working for the New York Herald Tribune, which, along with eight other local papers, shut down for 114 days during the 1962\u201363 newspaper strike. He had recently written about a custom car show\u2014phoned it in, by his own admission\u2014but he knew there was more to the story. Temporarily without an income, he pitched a story about the custom car scene to Esquire. \u201cReally, I needed to make some money,\u201d Wolfe tells me. \u201cYou could draw a per diem from the newspaper writers\u2019 guild, but it was a pittance. I was in bad shape,\u201d he chuckles. Esquire bit and sent the 32-year-old on his first visit to the West\u2014to Southern California, epicenter of the subculture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Anton: And without Wolfe, we would not understand California\u2014or the California-ized modern world. At the time of his most frequent visits, the state was undergoing a profound change, one that affects it to this day and whose every aspect has been exported throughout the country and the globe. Both have become much more like [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5630"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5630"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5631,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5630\/revisions\/5631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}