This image is the cover for the book Legendary Locals of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Legendary Locals

Legendary Locals of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Legendary Locals

A place whose history has long been a source of fable and fascination, Carmel-by-the-Sea is a community whose ancestors summered by the sea and ultimately stayed through the seasons. After founders Frank Powers and Frank Devendorf populated the once-barren potato patches with artists and academicians, it became a place defined as much by legends and landscape as by the characters who came to Carmel. Whether it is the clear light that attracted photographers Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Doug Steakley, and Bob Kolbrener; the whisper in the trees, the rhythm of the waves, and the stillness at dawn that seduced writers Mary Austin, Robinson Jeffers, Jack London, Bob Campbell, Rick Masten, and Jane Smiley; or the unbridled beauty in a majestic mountain, surging sea, or verdant valley that drew in artists Mary DeNeale Morgan, William F. Ritschel, E. Charlton Fortune, Mari Kloeppel, Carol Chapman, and Loet Vanderveen, the truth is that Carmel-by-the-Sea gets in one's soul and makes its home there.

Lisa Crawford Watson

A fifth-generation Northern Californian, Lisa Crawford Watson lives with her family in Carmel, where her grandmother once lived and wrote. A writing instructor for California State University Monterey Bay and Monterey Peninsula College, her own writing specializes in art, architecture and automobiles, health and lifestyle, and food and wine, but it always focuses on the people who brought such stories to life.

Arcadia Publishing