When crazy-haired producer Brian Grazer — of Friday Night Lights and 24 fame — put his 8,798-square-foot ranch in Pacific Palisades on the market in 2006 for a whopping $27.5 million, he proved a couple of things: that Hollywood's real estate bubble may never burst and that the late Cliff May, the house's midcentury architect, is hotter than ever. Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House (Rizzoli; $60) tells the colorful tale of this self-taught architectural Johnny Appleseed who scattered the ranch style from coast to coast.

May not only drew up the floor plan for the American dream, he lived it. He was a sixth-generation Californian, a horseman, a musician, and a furniture maker. He liked to drive fast down Sunset Boulevard, and he piloted his Bonanza plane to oversee construction sites from San Diego to Texas. In the 1930s, May pioneered the "Rancheria," with its large carport and single-level L- or U-shape protecting a garden and kidney-shaped pool, and saw it become the relaxed wish fulfillment — in wood, stone, and glass — of the fifties and sixties. Ebullient and enamored of new ideas, May created about 20,000 houses that were practical yet idealistic, futuristic yet romantic, mass-produced yet individualistic, at home in suburbia yet rambling like the West itself — and most important of all, made for indoor-outdoor living. "If you have to go down steps, why, you're not living like a real Californian," May once said, and, as this sumptuous book makes clear, there's still no better way