James D. Houston, a novelist, essayist and short-story writer firmly rooted in the West, whose works explored his native California, Hawaiian culture and, in collaboration with his wife, the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, died Thursday at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 75.

His death was due to complications of cancer, according to his daughter, Gabrielle.

Mr. Houston was the author of nine novels, including "Snow Mountain Passage" (2001), inspired by a personal link to the ill-fated Donner Party of early California history, and "Bird of Another Heaven" (2007), about a 19th-century woman of Hawaiian and California Indian ancestry.

"Whether in fiction or nonfiction, few writers have more consistently addressed the enduring issues arising out of the California experience than James D. Houston," said California historian and University of Southern California professor Kevin Starr.

With his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Mr. Houston also helped conceive and co-write the classic "Farewell to Manzanar" (1973), a first-person account of her family's experiences during and after their detention at the Manzanar camp. With more than 1.5 million copies in print, it is a staple of high school and college reading lists and was made into an Emmy-nominated television movie in 1976.

Ms. Wakatsuki Houston initially planned to write the story for her family as a document of a confusing and sorrowful period in their lives, but her husband convinced her that it deserved a broader audience.

He lived with his wife in an old Victorian house in Santa Cruz that, they learned after many years of residence, had been the last home of Patty Reed, the daughter of James Reed, one of the leaders of the Donner Party.

Several years passed before Mr. Houston finally plunged into research, retracing the Donner Party's trail and locating letters, diaries and other narratives by and about the Reeds and the horrifying events in the winter of 1846-47, when some members of the expedition resorted to cannibalism to survive.

He wrote "Snow Mountain Passage" as a dual narrative, alternating between James Reed's adventures and an elderly Patty Reed's recollections of the journey that unfolded when she was a young girl.

Mr. Houston's next novel also used history as a launching point.

An oral history led him to the story of Nani Keala, the daughter of a Pacific Rim emigrant who came up the Sacramento River with John Sutter in 1839 and helped build the California fort that bears Sutter's name.

The book explores California's beginnings and the famous and obscure characters whose machinations and dreams molded the state.

With University of California, Davis, professor W. Jack Hicks, novelist Maxine Hong Kingston and poet Al Young, Mr. Houston produced "The Literature of California" (2000), an anthology encompassing three centuries of literary history, from early Chumash legends to Mark Twain and Carlos Bulosan.

The son of poor west Texas immigrants, Mr. Houston was born in San Francisco on Nov. 10, 1933. He earned a bachelor's degree from San Jose State in 1956 and a master's in American literature from Stanford, where he studied with Wallace Stegner, in 1962.