James D. Houston, a writer whose works included "Farewell to Manzanar," about the World War II internment camp, and a book about Hawaiian music icon Eddie Kamae, died Thursday at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 75.

He died of complications from cancer, said his daughter, Gabrielle.

Houston was a Californian but considered Hawai'i his second home. He wrote widely about Hawaiian culture and history, and the book he was working on at the time of his death was a novel about Lili'uokalani, the last queen of the Hawaiian monarchy.

"I was so fortunate to have known him," said Kamae, about whom Houston wrote the book "Hawaiian Son," published by 'Ai Pohaku Press in 2004.

Houston and Kamae also collaborated on seven documentaries in Kamae's Hawaiian Legacy Series.

"Sons of Hawai'i: A Sound, A Band, A Legend," the seventh in the Legacy series, was a Hawaii International Film Festival nominee for best documentary.

With his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, the writer 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.

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 said, 'That's not just a story for your family, but a story that every American should read,' " she said yesterday.

Houston authored 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.

"Bird of Another Heaven" 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.

He researched and wrote "Snow Mountain Passage" after learning that the old Victorian house in Santa Cruz he and his wife were living in had been the last home of Patty Reed, the daughter of one of the leaders of the Donner Party.

"Jim epitomizes what we think of as a California writer," Alan Soldofsky, head of the creative writing program at California State University-San Jose, where Houston was writer-in-residence three years ago, said yesterday. "He had a consummate awareness of place and of the effect of both the natural and human communities on the writer's psyche, living on the edge of the continent."