New York: Dutton (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) (1978.) dj. Hardcover first edition - A collection of non-fiction - underlying these thirty-three essays is a single thread: "the confrontation between a transplanted Easterner's sensibilities and the culture of the contemporary West. Dunne finds his subjects in a tiny desert community on the edge of Death Valley, in a missile silo in Montana, in a town on San Francisco Bay with memories of being leveled during a World War II munitions explosion. He inhales the aroma of a small-time fight club; he experiences the doldrums of a road trip with a big-league baseball team; he visits a private detective who specializes in lost cat capers and spends the day with a stunt man who falls on his head for a living.... Taken together, they represent John Gregory Dunne at his best-which is to say, a remarkably perceptive and highly entertaining look at American life." Quintana is the name of Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion's daughter. 282 pp. ISBN: 0-525186751.

Death Valley, California: Death Valley Natural History Association, (1985, c. 1954.). From the author's preface:" Death Valley Scotty is a legend - one of the few who became legends while they lived. To the author and others who knew him, he was a very real, forceful and unique personality. Even in his eighties, he could hold a group spellbound with his tall tales, his individual phrasing and his ability to puncture a stuffed shirt with a few vivid words. Yet he never capitalized on his exploits, and he never hurt anyone, even those who called him a faker and harder names." Although basically a con-man, Scotty did not build and never owned the incredible edifice called Scotty's Castle in a remote canyon in northern Death Valley, California, although it was his home for many years - and his story is inextricably entwined with this desert oasis. Illustrated with photographs. 127 pp.

New York: Boni & Liveright, (1922). Hardcover first edition - A fascinating account of a trip by two suffragists (the author and her friend Charlotte Jordan) from Ohio to Death Valley - the heart of the Mohave - Although women had won the right to vote, their activism for women's rights had not ended, but they decided they needed a vacation: "Charlotte and I knew the outdoors a little. Though we were middle-aged, mothers of families and deeply involved in the historic struggle for the vote, we sometimes looked at the sky. . . I had some not altogether contemptible peaks to my credit and she had canoed in the Canadian wilds, so when we decided that a vacation was due us we chose the outdoors." As they passed through the Mojave on the train heading to Los Angeles where a car was awaiting them, they determined that that was where they wanted to visit, but it was actually when they returned the next year, that they took a trip in the spring in a wagon pulled by a mule and a horse, with the "Worrier", the sheriff of an almost deserted mining town, as a guide, that they actually reached Death Valley. While this does not ignore the hardships and dangers, Perkins is always aware of the ever-changing beauty of the desert. Illustrated with photographs. Hard to find. 227 pp.