The Marinaissance

Just north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, lies Marin County—a landscape of redwood forests and misted hills that, between World War II and the 1980s, became the unlikely epicenter of a cultural awakening. From blockbuster cinema to psychedelic rock, Eastern spirituality to speculative fiction, Marin helped forge a new American mythology.

In Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast, David Perlis delivers the first comprehensive narrative history of this awakening—what he calls the “Marinaissance.” The movement gave rise to Star Wars, nurtured the improvisational ethos of the Grateful Dead, and seeded a creative revolution that reverberated across music, religion, literature, film, and philosophy. Drawing from deep archival research and dozens of first hand interviews—including voices like Anne Lamott and Peter Coyote—Perlis reconstructs an era of radical experimentation. From mud-sunk Sausalito houseboats to back-to-the-land communes, Morning in Marin traces how a loose network of freethinkers—united by Zen practice, psychedelic exploration, reverence for nature, self-sufficiency, and a belief in human potential—sparked an “inner revolution” that ultimately reshaped global entertainment and spiritual life.

Join author David Perlis for a conversation about this rollicking California county that became the unlikely catalyst of New Age visionaries and New Hollywood power brokers whose iconoclasm broke—and then remade—the mold of American culture. He'll be joined by Heyday Publisher Steve Wasserman.

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.

Steve Wasserman is publisher of Heyday and author of Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie. He is a former editor-at-large for Yale University Press, editorial director of Times Books/Random House, publisher of Hill & Wang and The Noonday Press at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and editor-in-chief of New Republic Books. A founder of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at the University of Southern California, Wasserman was a principal architect of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books during the nine years he served as editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His writings have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Times Literary Supplement, among many others.