Pulitzer Prize winner Miriam Pawel’s epic history of one of the world’s elite public universities, its sweeping social impact, and hopeful lessons about endurance in troubled times.

Distinguished by its founding mission as an engine of upward mobility, the University of California—a constitutionally independent public trust—is a great American experiment that has persevered through fraught battles over access, funding, and leadership.

The University has been at the nexus of nearly every public policy debate and social movement since the Civil War, from women’s rights to student protests, from academic freedom to affirmative action, shaping policies that reverberate throughout the United States.

California Dreams narrates UC’s rise and resilience through the lens of those whose lives it has transformed—in particular, five pioneering graduates whose diverse paths underscore why the University remains, in the words of Berkeley graduate Joan Didion, “California’s best idea of itself.”

At a time of staggering inequality and uncertainty, as higher education faces unprecedented threats, that role has never been more crucial. Drawing on extensive research in ten archives and dozens of interviews, California Dreams weaves together the linked history of the school and state in all its drama, significance, and humanity; the result is a magisterial narrative of both a remarkable public institution of higher education, and also California itself.