The first book about the Nobel Laureate's transformative but
conflicted time in the Golden State.
"There is much to learn from this book about Milosz and California, yes,
but also about poetry and the world."--Ilya Kaminsky
Czeslaw Milosz, one of the greatest poets and thinkers of the past
hundred years, is not generally considered a Californian. But the Nobel
laureate spent four decades in Berkeley--more time than any other single
place he lived--and he wrote many of his most enduring works there. This
is the first book to look at his life through a California lens. Filled
with original research and written with the grace and liveliness of a
novel, it is both an essential volume for his most devoted readers and a
perfect introduction for newcomers.
Milosz was a premier witness to the sweep of the twentieth century, from
the bombing of Warsaw in World War II to the student protests of the
sixties and the early days of the high-tech boom. He maintained an
open-minded but skeptical view of American life, a perspective shadowed
by the terrors he experienced in Europe. In the light of recent
political instability and environmental catastrophe, his poems and ideas
carry extra weight, and they are ripe for a new generation of readers to
discover them. This immersive portrait demonstrates what Milosz learned
from the Golden State, and what Californians can learn from him.
