“Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915” was published in 1973, to great acclaim. The literary scholar John Seelye, reviewing it in The New York Times, called it “one devil of a fine book, a book only a native Californian could write.”

In the second volume in the series, “Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era,” which was published in 1985 and shifted the focus from Northern to Southern California, Mr. Starr described his intention to write intellectual history that showed how “the California of fact and the California of imagination shape and reshape each other.”

This he proceeded to do in succeeding “dream” books. He chronicled the rise of California as a land of opportunity in “Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s” (1990) and a treacherous paradise in the fraught years of the 1930s, which he described in two Janus-like volumes: the somber “Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California” (1996) and the much sunnier “The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s” (1997).

“Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950,” published in 2002, traced the emergence of the state as an industrial powerhouse. But the tale took a darker turn with “Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003,” published in 2004.

“I was beginning to wonder whether I had chosen a dead end,” Mr. Starr wrote in the introduction to that book. “Was California an aberration, a side show, or worse, a case study in how things could go wrong for the United States?”