Big Sur Trilogy: Part I - The Stranger: America's Last Pioneer Family
Lillian Bos Ross and her husband Harry Dicken Ross first backpacked into Big Sur in the summer of 1923 from Telegraph Hill in San Francisco where they were booksellers and part of a bohemian writers group.  Inspired by the land’s beauty and residents’ lifestyle, they chose to free themselves from their regulated lifestyle and live a life of ‘pioneer spirits’ in an environment of their choice, and they choses Big Sur.   After opening the first art gallery in Salinas, then spent a stint at the Hearst Castle where Dicken worked as a tile setter and wood carver, after which they hitched a 22-mile ride into the south coast of Big Sur with a man who earned $4.00 a day mining gold at Salmon Creek.    The magnificent and rugged coastal land enchanted them and in 1939 they settled into Livermore Ledge, a Big Sur homestead house.  They lived on salmon, Abalone, wild berries and bought coffee, eggs and honey for $1.00 from their friendly neighbors, the Big Sur homesteader families.  Dicken sold a few carved sculptures and Lillian wrote stories for area publications.  In 1942 The Stranger became a best seller and received the National Book Award.  The New York Times exclaimed, “So long as America has a stock of Zande and Hannah Allans…it can face any tomorrow unafraid” and Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “…it carries a thread of inspiration all thru it, which should be good news for us in these days”.  World War II was in full battle during the writing of The Stranger.  Lillian wrote in her diary on December 11, 1941, that “a Japanese submarine fired 12 shots at a lumber schooner off Pfeiffer Point” and three days later “the tanker Larry Doheny was bombed a few miles south of us and another tanker was sunk at San Simeon”.  These were nervous times for all Americans. Lillian’s second novel, Blaze Allan, named after Zande and Hannah’s daughter, reveals the rugged individualism of the American Pioneers whose last survivors flourished on the remote Big Sur Coast long before the automobile road, which took eighteen years to carve from the Big Sur cliffs, and opened up this inaccessible and sparsely-populated land to the travelers of the world.  When Lillian passed in 1959 she left behind the skeleton of the third book of the Big Sur Trilogy she titled The Road, an unfinished manuscript about the building of Highway One that was destined to be completed some fifty years later by Gary Koeppel.