Jack London wrote The Valley of the Moon in 1913 at his Beauty Ranch above Glen Ellen. The land is now Jack London State Historic Park. Each week the Wag reprints a passage from the valley’s most famous resident.
Crossing a bridge and rounding a sharp turn, they were suddenly enveloped in a mysterious coolness and gloom. All about them arose stately trunks of redwood. The forest floor was a rosy carpet of autumn fronds. Occasional shafts of sunlight, penetrating the deep shade, warmed the somberness of the grove. Alluring paths led off among the trees and into cozy nooks made by circles of red columns growing around the dust of vanished ancestors–witnessing the titanic dimensions of those ancestors by the girth of the circles in which they stood.
Jack London, The Valley of the Moon (1913)
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