In The Life and Truth of George R. Stewart, Scott notes that a little more than a year after Stewart’s death in 1980, a “century-sized Maria of a storm hit California.” San Francisco received half of its annual rainfall in a day; eighteen thousand landslides occurred in a night. At Thornton State Beach, a small park just south of San Francisco that Stewart had frequented, an avalanche of mud buried the George R. Stewart Nature Trail. Maria, or one of her great-granddaughters, had paid him a tribute. That storm, in the final analysis, was not unusual either. What was unusual was the existence of the state park, the product of shortsightedness and unmerited optimism in the powers of human enterprise: it lay on a vulnerable hillside below Route 35, dangerously exposed to the action of tides and coastal storms. Four decades later, the park remains closed to the general public.

—Nathaniel Rich

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

“How DID you come to write Storm?” Ever since publication day that has been what people have asked me, and although the question implies a compliment as to the originality of the theme and treatment, still it has come to be monotonous, and I have even begun to recognize the light in the speaker’s eye which leads up to it. I might have satisfied these questioners and have saved myself some trouble if I could have written an introduction to begin with, and now that I have a chance to write one, that is certainly the question to try to answer.

There is of course no complete or final explanation. No writer, I suppose, can remember or identify altogether the sources of his ideas. But to work at the conscious level, I should say, first of all, that I had lived for fifteen years on the slope of the Berkeley Hills looking westward to San Francisco Bay and through the Golden Gate to the horizon-line of the Pacific. From that vantage-ground I had watched the winter storm-fronts sweep in from the West with all their majesty. No observing person can live in such a spot without becoming storm-conscious.

More specifically, in the winter of 1937–38 I was living in Mexico. Some of the storms that struck California were reported in the local newspapers. Reading in Spanish about what was happening in my own state, I was doubly impressed with the dramatic values of a California storm. I then definitely, although vaguely, got the idea for a story thus centered. This story, as originally conceived, fell into a familiar enough pattern, that is, the adventures of many unrelated or slightly related people all happening to be affected by the same event.