A New York resident until 1997, I knew most Honeymooners and Seinfeld dialogue by heart. This year, as I celebrate my 12th year in the Mojave Desert, AAA in California and the California Writers Club observe their centennials, and our country honors Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial.

A weird mismatch of Big Apples, California oranges and Abe? Not at all. Lincoln championed the transcontinental railroad. AAA pioneered services for car enthusiasts. Together they brought tourists West, while California writers urged them to come.

Jack London, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, John Muir and so many more gave the West a voice, telling the world of a rugged, scenic frontier. They showed that the U.S. had expanded to assume its own unique identity from sea to shining sea. They helped define U.S. adventure travel.

Within decades, hard-boiled fictional detectives sprang to life in San Francisco (Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade), Los Angeles (Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe) and a doppelganger Santa Barbara (Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer). And the Beat Generation found San Francisco.

John Steinbeck once aspired to emulate Jack London’s seafaring on a freighter. Scaling down his vision to trains and autos, I’ve visited sweeping panoramas and questionable alleys, crossing a spiritual bridge to favorite writers’ moments of torment and joy. The more I saw, the more I wanted to see. For example…

Jack London bought his Beauty Ranch an hour north of San Francisco with profits from The Call of the Wild and other bestsellers. He and wife Charmian lie buried there, and the cottage where he wrote still stands, along with the ruined stone walls of his cherished Wolf House that burned to the ground in 1913 and took his dreams with it.

Steinbeck’s native city, Salinas, on the coast about an hour’s drive south of San Francisco, embraces his legacy with the Steinbeck House where the Nobel- and Pulitzer-Prize winner grew up and later worked on parts of The Red Pony and Tortilla Flat. The National Steinbeck Center in Salinas offers free walking-tour brochures and has a huge exhibit, including the custom-made camper Rocinante that Steinbeck drove in his memoir Travels with Charley.

In San Francisco, John’s Grill—the haunt of both Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade—occupies a piece of Union Square, and for the rest of the City by the Bay, author Scott Lettieri conducts literary tours from the post-Gold Rush era to the Beat Generation. Tours begin at the historic first all-paperbound bookshop in the U.S., City Lights Bookstore, co-owned by Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

An hour southeast of Los Angeles, in Hemet, the epic outdoor Ramona Pageant dramatizes reformer Helen Hunt Jackson’s groundbreaking 1884 novel of doomed love set against the backdrop of Native American rights, Mexican rule and California statehood.

Skip forward to 2009, and the list goes on with people I can admire face-to-face. Ray Bradbury often appears for library fundraisers and stops by the Los Angeles Public Library Koreatown branch that he frequented as a teenager. Amy Tan and other luminaries speak at college campuses or at events such as the Jack London, Redwood and East of Eden writers’ conferences (calwriters.org).

These days I reside in Grapes of Wrath’s Kern County in the shadow of John Muir’s Sierra Nevada. An hour from here, I can feel the vibes of the Great Central Valley of William Saroyan and contemporary talents, Gerald Haslam, David Mas Masumoto and playwright/director/author/Teatro Campesino founder Luis Valdez. A five-hour drive delivers me eight miles south of Angels Camp to the very cabin where Bret Harte and Mark Twain experienced mining.

I can tell you that I sat in Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner’s office in Ventura (a 20-minute drive southeast of Santa Barbara) and strolled Author’s Row at the Mission Inn in Riverside (an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles) where prominent writers had rooms. But never mind me. The journey awaits you.

I hereby resume that century-old urging. Do what the railroads, AAA and California writers got tourists doing 100 years ago. Discover the California of Twain, London, Muir, Steinbeck, Hammett, Macdonald and Jackson. Watch, read and listen and let the surroundings weave their spell.

Donna McCrohan Rosenthal is a long-time writer for this magazine.