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1905
American author, editor, and lawyer Carey McWilliams was born in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. After dropping out of college, he joined his family in Southern California, where he earned a law degree from the University of Southern California in 1927. He went on to a literary career mentored and befriended by the likes of Robinson Jeffers, John Fante, Louis Adamic, Upton Sinclair, Mary Austin, and H.L. Mencken. McWilliams loathed Richard Nixon, whom he described in 1950 as “a dapper little man with an astonishing capacity for petty malice.” His interpretive history Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) inspired the screenplay for the movie Chinatown (1974). [Sources: Southern California Country: An Island on the Land and Wikipedia.]