Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante

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.