Love and War in California tells the story, through the eyes of Payton Daltrey, of the last sixty years of an evolving America.
The award-winning author Oakley Hall begins his newest work in 1940s San Diego, where his endearing, wide-eyed narrator must define his identity in terms of self, family, and World War II. As his classmates disappear into the war one by one, he becomes obsessed with abuses of power and embroiled with the charming, dangerous Errol Flynn; with the Red Baiting of the American Legion; with the House Un-American Activities Committee; and with the Japanese interment at Manzanar. Nevertheless, Payton, too, must go to the war, where he is a part of the invasion of Europe and that proving of the American soldier: the Battle of the Bulge. After war’s end and time in New York, he returns to California as a writer and a seeker, whose old, long-lost love rises from the ashes to show him who he really is.

Hall has been called a “master craftsman” (Amy Tan) with “one of the finest prose styles around” (Michael Chabon), and he has received the PEN Center USA West Award of Honor and the P&W Writers for Writers Award. Coming on the heels of Hall’s San Francisco Chronicle bestseller (a reissue of his classic Western, Warlock), Love and War in California is more than a novel about a young boy who grows old. It’s about how the passions of youth become the verities of age, and how we evolve as a nation, a country, and a people during times that are all at once turbulent, dangerous, and stirring.

Reviews:

"Eminently enjoyable for its splendid detail."

— Publishers Weekly
 

“When I read the first ten pages of Love and War in California, I had that heady sense of falling in love. My amazement grew as I read long into the night. Everything about this book sings to me. Oakley Hall evokes the story of a young man’s soul and that of his town and his country in a time of great change and uncertainty. It is both intimate and universal, graceful and exuberant. It reflects on human desire and belonging, the complexities of honesty and loyalty, truth and fairness, the unraveling of ideas and passion, and the emergence of something greater. Hall accomplishes this with compassion, honesty, and the occasional wink. This is a book for our times, a book that will surely stand out as an enduring masterpiece of American literature.”

- Amy Tan

 "Love and War in California is classic American story-telling, in the manner of James Jones and the Norman Mailer we first loved. It is made for a reader who wants to sit down with a book, stay up all night and not quit until the end." 

— Pulitzer Prize Winner Richard Ford
 

"Oakley Hall's Love and War in California is in so many ways a culmination, a fulfillment, a peak: of Hall's artistry, of his lifelong exploration of the recurring motifs and topography and mythology of the American west, and of the great post-Chandler novel itself, that epic romance of disillusion and of promise betrayed, of which Hall is, as this book proves, our greatest living master." 

— Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Chabon

About the Author:

Oakley Hall (July 1, 1020 - May 12, 2008) was for twenty years director of the program in writing at the University of California Irvine and is a founder and general director emeritus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. His novel Warlock's 2005 reissue was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller.

Oakley was an American novelist. He was born in San Diego, California, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and served in the Marines during World War II. Some of his mysteries were published under the pen names "O.M. Hall" and "Jason Manor." Hall received his Master of Fine Arts in English from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

His books focus primarily on the historical American West. His most famous book, Warlock, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958. The film adaptation of the same title was directed by Edward Dmytryk. In Thomas Pynchon's introduction to Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, Pynchon stated that he and Fariña started a "micro-cult" around Warlock. Another novel, The Downhill Racers was made into a film starring Robert Redford in 1969.

After the death of Wallace Stegner, Hall was considered the dean of West Coast writers, having supported the early careers of California novelists such as Richard Ford and Michael Chabon, both graduates of the well-known writing program at the University of California, Irvine where Hall taught for many years. Hall's colleagues at Irvine included Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and fellow Iowa graduate Charles Wright and poet and Victorian Scholar Robert Peters. San Diego—and Hall's one-time San Diego neighborhood of Mission Hills—serve as focal points of two novels: "Corpus of Joe Bailey" and his 2007 novel "Love & War in California."

Among his many honors are lifetime achievement awards from the PEN American Center and the Cowboy Hall of Fame. He was also the father of the playwright Oakley "Tad" Hall III.