The Road To Los Angeles The Saga Of Arturo Bandini 2

I had a lot of jobs in Los Angeles Harbor because our family was poor and my father was dead. My first job was ditchdigging a short time after I graduated from high school. Every night I couldn’t sleep from the pain in my back. We were digging an excavation in an empty lot, there wasn’t any shade, the sun came straight from a cloudless sky, and I was down in that hole digging with two huskies who dug with a love for it, always laughing and telling jokes, laughing and smoking bitter tobacco..

John Fante, an important figure in the history of the Italian-American novel, is proving to be fascinating to contemporary readers. Richard Collins has caught Fante's spirit from several crucial angles: as an ethnic writer; as a comic novelist; as a serious writer struggling to remain so in Hollywood. Intelligent, balanced, informative, and empathetic, this book combines criticism with scholarship, and biography with history to make what Henry James would have called a perfect 'literary portrait,' for it gives life to an interesting subject..

Essays that appeal to fans of the mystery genre--and those just plain fascinated by Los Angeles..

The editors' goal in this book is to give a critical overview of where Italian/American literary and cultural studies are today. To this end, Beyond the Margin includes three types of essays: the characteristics of Italian/American literature and culture in a general sense; specific writers; and film..

Over the span of a half-century - from the early 1930s to the early 1980s - the Italian-American Fante (1909-1983) wrote short stories and novels that drew on his own life from his Catholic childhood in Colorado through his down-and-out days in Los Angeles, to his adventures as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He writes about all these things with gusto, humor, directness, and an honesty tinged with the irony of a true modernist."--BOOK JACKET..

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