Author Jennifer Basye Sander Dishes About Some of Sacramento’s Bold-Faced Names

By Ed Goldman

Jennifer Basye Sander wants visitors to and residents of Sacramento to know that California’s capital has housed its share of literary and artistic glam.

Author of more than 60 books and a former editor for Random House, Basye Sander creates and leads tours of Sacramento’s Old City Cemetery to highlight some of the boldfaced names who now grace markers instead of marquees—and of various parts of the area where, for example, the great short-story writer Raymond Carver managed an apartment house, author William Saroyan worked for the U.S. Army Depot during World War II, and Oona O’Neill had drinks at the Senator Hotel. (She was playwright Eugene O’Neill’s daughter and ultimately, Charlie Chaplin’s fourth and final wife. Guess he finally got it right.)

“A lot of people think all of these artists and writers spent most of their early years starving in stylish garrets in New York City,” Basye Sander says in a breezy, dahhling-you’re-maaahvelous tone that would give her a faux aristocratic air if she weren’t so self-aware. Her tours are booked at airbnb experience’s “Literary Secrets of Sacramento.”

Basye Sander has the chops of both a writer and historian to lead these journeys into portions of the region’s golden past—which, for a change, don’t involve actual gold (as in the discovery of same, which took place in Coloma, anyway, about 47 miles from Sacramento).

She was flying high as an editor when, 19 years ago, Random House closed the book division where she worked. She and a number of her colleagues lost their jobs, while 30-to-40 writers lost their book deals. (I was one of those. Basye Sander had commissioned me to write a book, “J. Paul Getty On Wealth,” which was in its final design phase when things imploded.)

The shutdown didn’t appear to shut down Basye Sander. Having worked in the acquisitions end of the publishing industry for 20 years before starting to write books herself, she’d already worked directly with writers to buff their work to a high sheen. At some point she even became a New York Times bestselling author; her newest book, coming out this fall, is  “Churchill: A Drinking Life, Champagne, Cognac, and Cocktails.” Sounds tasty.

On Basye Sander’s Sacramento tour, which she modifies a bit for each smallish group (four to six visitors), you’ll learn about such well-known home-grown heroes as the late author, scenarist, journalist and playwright Joan Didion, and the very much alive filmmaker Greta Gerwig (“Lady Bird” and “Little Women”)—but also about literary lights nor always associated with Sacramento, such as the author Margaret Craven (1901-1980), who wrote “I Heard the Owl Call my Name.” She grew up and died here.

The always-brilliant/often-controversial scholar Cornel West is from Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood.  Other literary notables from the River City include the San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, who was never coy about his origins, even dubbing himself “the Sackamenna kid.” Sadly, he also said the principal difference between Sacramento and yogurt was that the latter had culture.