John Steven McGroarty — Collected Poems
John Steven McGroarty helped invent the popular memory of Southern California. A journalist, poet, regional historian, public official, and tireless promoter, he turned missions, pioneers, mountains, Spanish California, Irish memory, civic celebration, and personal loss into verse meant for newspapers, gift books, pageants, and public performance. Just California and Songs Along the Way and Wander Songs established his characteristic mixture of ballad, patriotic lyric, landscape poem, and historical romance. His greatest theatrical undertaking, The Mission Play, transformed that regional mythology into a vast civic spectacle performed for decades at San Gabriel. This Collected Poems restores the two principal books and scattered verse, with a fully reset text of The Mission Play in the appendix. Read together, they show both the imaginative power and the historical simplifications through which McGroarty made California history into public theater.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
McGroarty, John Steven. Just California and Songs Along the Way. The Times-Mirror Company, 1903.
———. Wander Songs. Grafton Publishing Company, 1908.
———. The King's Highway 1909 (Illustrated Poem).
———. The Mission Play. Mission Play Association, 1911–1912; revised editions followed.
———. California: Its History and Romance. Grafton Publishing Company, 1911.
———. Fresno County, the Geographical Hub of the State of California. Fresno County Expositions Commission, 1915.
———. The Story of the Missions. Walter A. Abbott, 1918.
———. Los Angeles from the Mountains to the Sea. American Historical Society, 1921.
———. Mission Memories. Neuner Corporation, 1929.
———. California of the South: A History. 5 vols. S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1933.
———. The California Plutarch. J. R. Finnell, circa 1935.