<P ALIGN="LEFT">An inspiring celebration of California by its most renowned artist, this handsome book features many rarely seen photographs coupled with an intriguing selection of writings about the state by classic and contemporary authors. Ansel Adams lived his entire life in California, and his monumental photographs of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada won him worldwide fame. Throughout his career, from the 1920s to the 1980s, Adams also photographed many other areas of the Golden State, from the Sonoma Valley to Big Sur to Death Valley. This volume collects for the first time a full range of these California images. Sixty-five beautifully reproduced photographs capture some of California&amp;apos;s most inimitable vistas; San Francisco, the Golden Gate, Point Reyes, the North Coast, redwood forests, Mt. Lassen, orchards in Santa Clara, Lake Tahoe, lettuce fields in the Salinas Valley, and the gold country, among many others. It is a personal, intimate view, in which Adams&amp;apos; magnificent landscapes are highlighted by glimpses of the state&amp;apos;s distinctive architecture and selected portraits of its citizens. The book opens with a superb introduction by Page Stegner, novelist, journalist, and longtime California resident. The photographs are accompanied throughout by evocative poems, essays and passages about California by a wide range of notable writers, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, John Muir, Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck, Wallace Stegner, John McPhee, and Joan Didion.</P>