Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante Book

The first biography of one of the great outsiders of American literature.

In the first comprehensive biography of John Fante, one of the great lost souls of twentieth-century literature, Stephen Cooper untangles the enigma of an authentic American original. By turns savage and poetic, violent and full of love, such underground novels as The Road to Los Angeles; Ask the Dust; and Wait Until Spring, Bandini simultaneously reveal and disguise their author.

Born in 1909 to poor Italian American parents in Colorado, Fante ventured west in 1930 to become a writer. Eventually settling in Los Angeles' faded downtown area of Bunker Hill, Fante starved between menial Depression-era jobs while writing story after story about the world he knew-full of poverty, hatred, and the madness of love. His first stories were published by H. L. Mencken in the American Mercury, but Fante also made a career in Hollywood working with the likes of Orson Welles and Darryl F. Zanuck.

By the time of his death, though, he was nearly forgotten. Fortunately, readers such as Charles Bukowski began to recognize that Ask the Dust stands alongside the best work of Nathanael West and Sherwood Anderson. This exacting and vivid biography will help secure Fante's place in the American literary pantheon.

Publishers Weekly

Hailed by many as the great novel about L.A., Ask the Dust (Stackpole, 1939) was primed to place Fante--and his alter-ego Arturo Bandini--in the American literary world forever. Cooper, a film lecturer at California State University at Long Beach, beautifully details the hardscrabble life of this little-known American great who squandered his best writing for the riches of Hollywood. Born in 1909 to Italian immigrant parents and educated at Catholic schools in Denver, Colo., at 23 Fante left a fragmented family life for L.A., where he scraped together a living doing manual labor, shipwork and canning in order to write in the evenings. An admirer of H.L. Mencken, Fante began a one-sided correspondence with the famed editor and submitted all his work to the American Mercury, until in 1934 Mencken accepted "Altar Boy," the first of many short stories that Fante would publish. Soon Fante set to work on a novel and, with Mencken's help, he found employment as a Hollywood screenwriter to support himself. Cooper seamlessly pieces together every detail of Fante's life, from the amount he was paid for each script to the gambling debts he incurred. He also tenderly portrays Fante's tumultuous 46-year relationship with his wife, Joyce, and their four children. Joyce would take dictation for the ailing writer, who, before he died in 1983, lost his eyesight and both legs to the ravages of diabetes. Cooper's enthusiasm for Fante is matched only by that of the late Charles Bukowski, who proclaimed that Fante taught him how to write and in the early 1980s encouraged Black Sparrow Press to reissue his work. In the end, Cooper makes a convincing case for Fante's placement on the mantel of the greats. Photos. (Apr.) FYI: Fante's complete works are available through Black Sparrow Press. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|