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By Alex McGinn, Publicity Intern

It’s no secret that East Coasters are skeptical of the West Coast. Southern California seems particularly peculiar to most inhabitants of the northeastern seaboard; perhaps its picturesque landscape, balmy weather, and laid back lifestyle seem out of touch with the realities of fast-paced East Coast cities. But what some of these West Coast cynics may not know is that SoCal’s most influential “boosters” were refugees of the northeast.

Thinking about this, I turned to The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America by Lawrence Culver. Here are a few important Yankees who escaped their overworked and seemingly miserable East Coast fates to become the earliest developers of some of Southern California’s most iconic getaways.

Charles Lummis known as a booster of Los Angeles and Palm Springs was born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1859. The son of a Methodist minister, Lummis attended Harvard, but devoted less time to his studies than to romantic pursuits. He enjoyed his summers hiking, mountain climbing, and writing poetry while employed at a relative’s resort hotel in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After failing out of school, Lummis married Dorothea Rhodes, a medical student he had met while at Harvard. After fleeing New England for Ohio, the two’s marriage faltered as did Lummis’s career as a newspaper editor. To make matters worse, Lummis had contracted malaria. He decided that he needed a fresh start and found it in Los Angeles. Chronic overwork, too little sleep, too much alcohol, and continuing marital problems resulted in a stroke that paralyzed his left side at the age of 29. After his recovery in Iseleta Pueblo, New Mexico, Lummis published several books that glorified the Southwest. This glorification tremendously aided the city of Los Angeles and granted it its allure.

Charles Frederick Holder known as a founding booster of Catalina Island began his career as a scientist and author. Interestingly enough, Holder was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, the same birthplace of Charles Lummis, in 1851. He attended the prestigious United States Naval Academy, but left before graduating. He served for several years as the assistant curator of zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and authored a number of books. He came to Southern California to recuperate from a lung infection aggravated by overwork. Like Lummis, Holder published several books about Southern California focusing on Catalina Island, which he believed encapsulated the region’s healthfulness and distinctive flora and fauna. Holder’s accounts of swimming, hunting and other recreational activities attracted tourists to the Southern Californian getaway.

John C. Van Dyke known as the first booster of Coachella Valley was the art critic for Century Magazine and one of the best-known and widely read public intellectuals in the nation. While he frequented Charles Lummis’s salon at El Alisal, he remained firmly entrenched on the East Coast, where he was librarian at New Brunswick Theological Seminary and the first professor of art history at Rutgers University. However, the deserts of California, to his eyes, contained the most delicate palette of colors imaginable. Van Dyke narrated his book <

Lee Fiora is a modest girl from the Midwest, blessed by luck and hours of effort, who has won a place and a scholarship to the Ault school, a prestigious Northeastern boarding school. Vineyard Vines, Ralph Lauren and J. Crew labels are everywhere to be seen, while the school demands more academically than Lee has ever experienced. Awed and apprehensive, Lee begins her Ault career, unsure of her place in this affluent, preppy world. As the weeks and months continue, Lee becomes progressively more alienated, feeling friendless and very much an outsider. She is not privy to East Coast slang, the favorite brands; her hair is not long and sleek, her body not completely soft and slender. The novel follows Lee for her four years at Ault, during which time she becomes hardly more integrated. She spends the overwhelming majority of her high school years feeling self-conscious and rather miserable, because she feels that any thought, expression or action outside of the norm will alienate her further and cause others to think badly of her.

I liken this feeling of being scrutinized to the concept of the “panopticon,” in the book The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks. A panopticon is a circular jail, arranged around a central well so that the prisoners could be watched at all times. Because of the constant assumption that they were being watched, the prisoners behaved and little watching ever really had to occur. In Prep, and in The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks, the boarding school atmosphere makes for a sort of panopticon—an environment in which everyone feels as though they are always being watched, and behave accordingly. For Frankie, in Disreputable History, the panopticon serves to fascinate her and spark a rebellion within her. In Prep, the panopticon makes Lee miserable, for she feels as though her every move must be calculated to follow what the popular students are doing, and she spends more time desperately trying to fit in than she does nearly anything else. Life with a desperate and masochistic motivation such as this is not a happy one; Lee is constantly miserable and ends up allowing herself to be used sexually by a popular boy, for after wanting so long to be wanted, she grasps at the first possibility. Lee acts for almost the sole motivation of wanting not necessarily to be accepted –for being different is never desirable—but included.

Prep was written by Curtis Sittenfeld, sort of as a memoir. Sittenfeld attended a very prestigious boarding school as a teenager, and changed the name and a few key facts in the book, in order to somewhat protect its identity. Knowing this as I read was a little sad, for Curtis, alias Lee, has such an awful time in the text.

Prep is the bittersweet story of a girl who enters into a lavish world that seems ideal to her, but quickly learns that the pressure to be the unattainable elite is suffocating, and she finds herself barely gasping for breath over the four years of her life there. The really sad thing was that by the end of the novel, Lee does not seem to have really learned anything. She has not decided to be true to herself, or not care what others think of her. Perhaps this is more realistic, but it is still rather melancholy.

Prep is basically a depressing read. And though the insights on life at such an institution as Ault were interesting and well-explored, often the book lagged in Lee’s despair and alienation.