But 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. Ansel Adams lived his entire life in California, and his monumental photographs of the states most striking natural wonders -- Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada -- won him worldwide renown. The seventy beautifully reproduced duotone photographs capture some of Californias most striking and exemplary vistas -- San Francisco, the Golden Gate, Point Reyes, the North Coast, redwood forests, Mount Lassen, orchards in Santa Clara, Lake Tahoe, lettuce fields in the Salinas Valley, and the gold country, among many others. This volume collects the full range of Adams California images for the first time, focusing largely an his lesser-known work outside the Sierra. Accompanying these wonderful photographs are 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, John McPhee, Wallace Stegner, and Joan Didion. It is a personal and intimate view, full of Adams peerless landscapes but interspersed with glimpses of the states distinctive architecture and scattered portraits of its luminaries. 2007