Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante

Though his talent was all but ruined in her clutches, John Fante's muse was Los Angeles; he made his home in the faded downtown area, Bunker Hill, starving between menial Depression-era jobs, while writing story after story about the world he knew -- full of poverty, hatred, and the madness of love. In the first comprehensive biography of Fante, Stephen Cooper untangles the enigma of one of twentieth-century literature's great outsider figures, whose early novels and stories are lately classed with the best work of Nathanael West and Sherwood Anderson.