Tracks Along the Left Coast

California, with its scores of native languages, contains a wealth of old-time stories—a bedrock literature of North America. Jaime de Angulo’s linguistic and ethnographic work, his writings, as well as the legends that cloak the Old Coyote himself, vividly reflect the particulars of the Pacific Coast. In each retelling, through each storyteller, stories are continually revivified, and that is precisely what Andrew Schelling has done in Tracks Along the Left Coast , weaving together the story of de Angulo’s life with the story of the land and the people, languages, and cultures with whom it is so closely tied.

Born in Paris of Spanish descent, de Angulo came to America to become a cowboy, and he did—as well as a doctor, a linguist, an ethnomusicologist, and a writer. His poetry and prose uniquely represented the bohemian sensibility of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and he was known for his reworkings of coyote tales and shamanic mysticism. So vivid was his writing that Ezra Pound called him “the American Ovid,” and William Carlos Williams claimed that de Angulo was “one of the most outstanding writers I have ever encountered.”