Dave Perlis at Book Passage

Join Morning in Marin author Dave Perlis for a reading and conversation with Peter Coyote at Book Passage in Corte Madera. This is a free event, open to the public.

Just north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, lies Marin County—a landscape of redwood forests and misted hills that, between World War II and the 1980s, became the unlikely epicenter of a cultural awakening. From blockbuster cinema to psychedelic rock, Eastern spirituality to speculative fiction, Marin helped forge a new American mythology.  

In Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast (on sale September 1, 2026), David Perlis delivers the first comprehensive narrative history of this awakening—what he calls the “Marinaissance.” The movement gave rise to Star Wars, nurtured the improvisational ethos of the Grateful Dead, and seeded a creative revolution that reverberated across music, religion, literature, film, and philosophy.  

Marin was not only home to cultural juggernauts such as George Lucas, Alan Watts, Janis Joplin, Robin Williams, Gary Snyder, and Philip K. Dick—it profoundly shaped their work. As Perlis writes, “The Marinaissance is multitudes,” manifesting everywhere from the Jedi’s belief in the power of the self to Shel Silverstein’s anti-authoritarian children’s verse. Marin was a nexus of East-meets-West spirituality and a proving ground for sounds and stories that would dominate global culture.  

Drawing from deep archival research and dozens of firsthand interviews—including voices like Anne Lamott and Peter Coyote—Perlis reconstructs an era of radical experimentation. From mud-sunk Sausalito houseboats to back-to-the-land communes, Morning in Marin traces how a loose network of freethinkers—united by Zen practice, psychedelic exploration, reverence for nature,  self-sufficiency, and a belief in human potential—sparked an “inner revolution” that ultimately reshaped global entertainment and spiritual life.  

But Perlis also charts the contradictions. He examines the unique conditions that allowed the Marinaissance to flourish—producing some of the most valuable intellectual property and devoted fan cultures in modern history—while identifying the social, economic, and ideological forces that led to its fragmentation.  

The result is a sweeping, immersive cultural history: a rollicking constellation of Zen teachers, Beat poets, mystic feminists, psychedelic rockers, New Age visionaries, and New Hollywood power brokers whose iconoclasm broke—and then remade—the mold of American culture.  

Morning in Marin is both a portrait of a place and a story of how local experimentation became a global empire—how a quiet county north of the Golden Gate helped script the American imagination.

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