"This is the first book on bungalows since the phenomenon of the early twentieth century collapsed in the Great Depression. Robert Winter sees these sometimes not-so-modest digs as documents of social history. The American dream has generally been based on the idea of a single-family dwelling equipped with all the latest conveniences and set in a garden, however small. California provided the perect landscape, scenically, economically and socially for the proliferation of houses that the careful observer of California culture, Mary Austin, called "as indigenous to the soil as if they had grown up out of it." Robert Winter, who lives in a bungalow that is on the National Register of Historic Places, is Professor of the History of Ideas at Occidental College, Los Angeles."--Page 4 of cover.