Author Description

This important collection of essays on the writers who have made Los Angeles one of the great cities of twentieth-century literature has been made even stronger by the inclusion of three new essays. John Fante, Walter Mosley, and Chester Himes join Aldous Huxley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Nathanael West, Norman Mailer, James M. Cain, Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, Budd Schulberg, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and Thomas Pynchon as well as less familiar writers - Oscar Zeta Acosta, Horace McCoy, Thomas Sanchez, Marc Norman, and Hysaye Yamamoto - in a text that provides a basic literary history of the region. Thoughtful consideration is given to such special Los Angeles genres as the detective story and the Hollywood novel, and a chapter is devoted to the film Chinatown.