This important collection of essays on the writers who have made Los Angeles one of the great cities of twentieth-century literature. John Fante, Walter Mosley, and Chester Himes join writers including Aldous Huxley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Norman Mailer, Raymond Chandler, and Thomas Pynchon. Essays examine such special Los Angeles genres as the detective story and the Hollywood novel.

This important collection of essays on the writers who have made Los Angeles one of the great cities of twentieth-century literature has been strengthened by the inclusion of three new essays. John Fante, Walter Mosley, and Chester Himes join such writers as 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 such as Oscar Zeta Acosta, Horace McCoy, Thomas Sanchez, Marc Norman, and Hysaye Yamamoto in a text that provides a basic literary history of the region. Essays examine such special Los Angeles genres as the detective story and the Hollywood novel, and a chapter is devoted to the film Chinatown.