Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast

A revelatory cultural history of free spirits and wild ideas from Alan Watts to George Lucas and far beyond.

"Those of us who grew up in Marin always knew it was a special place. Just how special, and why, is brilliantly articulated in this exhaustively researched book." --Huey Lewis

"As close to a perfect history of Northern California and the various artists that nursed at its breast." --Peter Coyote

"Reading Morning in Marin, you get the sense it served as America's leading countercultural way station." --Los Angeles Times

Cross the Golden Gate and enter the rollicking creative scene of midcentury Marin County, a fertile font of risk-takers and radical thinkers. In these misted hills, currents of art and philosophy swirl, giving rise to the seismic cultural awakening out of which Star Wars, Alan Watts, and the Grateful Dead all emerge. Marin is where Anna Halprin dances, Philip K Dick dreams, Gary Snyder circumambulates, and Janis Joplin hides. What made Marin such a galvanizing force of iconoclasm and counterculture: Was it the money, Mount Tamalpais, the acid trips? With a fresh voice steeped in local lore, David Perlis dips into parties on Sausalito houseboats, hangs around communes in West Marin, and introduces us to the visionaries who sowed the seeds of an organic inner revolution that bloomed into a global commercial empire--transforming Marin along the way as outsider elements became the consummate insiders. Blending pop culture, biography, and a deeply affectionate sense of place into an immersive narrative history, Morning in Marin traces a movement of Zen thinkers, Beat poets, mystic feminists, and psychedelic rockers from their radical beginnings through their crises and contradictions. Forging an unbroken chain from bohemians and Beats to New Age and New Hollywood, Perlis reveals how the people, places, and ideas of Marin combined to create a lasting American mythology.

David Perlis is a writer, musician, and filmmaker from Marin County, California. For nearly a decade he co-hosted the late night talk show Night People on WFMU. He has worked for the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Natural History. He now lives in Corrales, New Mexico. Morning in Marin is his first book.