Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante [Paperback]

Stephen Cooper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Unfamiliar with the works of John Fante? Sadly, you're not alone. While his few novels received critical acclaim, they went out of print quickly, and for most of his career Fante relied on Hollywood screenwriting to support both his family and his habits. Stephen Cooper has done a terrific job of uncovering Fante's life here, and more than anything, his biography makes the reader want to turn back to the writer's books (Ask the Dust, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, The Road to Los Angeles, The Brotherhood of the Grape, among others--all currently in print, courtesy of Black Sparrow Press). With elegant prose and painstaking detail, Cooper reveals a tortured man who once ended a letter with this telling statement: "Writing is a great joy, but the profession of writing is horrible." Beginning with Fante's family history--immigration, menial labor, heavy drinking, and financial instability--and ending with a final 17-month hospitalization, the roller coaster that was his life is both fascinating and exhausting. Even while his screenplay Full of Life achieved critical accolades, Fante referred to himself as "that Hollywood whore, that stinking sell-out artist," and with every increase in his paycheck he seemed to fall further into bitterness. Throughout the pages that link Fante's professional and personal lives, we're shown a proud grandpa, an unrepentant gambler and heavy-drinking diabetic, and above all, a tremendously talented writer who was always his own worst critic. Would he appreciate being rescued from obscurity? Hard to say: as he wrote to his son in the early '60s, "Success is too vague a challenge. Maybe failure is even better; certainly it is more beautiful." --Jill Lightner --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From 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 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press (April 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865476055
• ISBN-13: 978-0865476059
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,952,871 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stephen Cooper delivers, John Fante in the fullness of life, October 22, 2005

By 

D. "Kastinovich" (Southern Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante (Paperback)

Lest anyone believe the dribble of the last reviewer who gave Cooper's biography one star, I thought I'd send in a review that at least strives for honesty, to say nothing of accuracy, which that other reviewer made no attempt to show. Stephen Cooper's biography of John Fante is a thoroughly enjoyable if occasionally painful read. Enjoyable because he presents a well-rounded picture of the man who penned such American classics as: Ask The Dust, The Brotherhood of the Grape, My Dog Stupid, Dreams From Bunker Hill, and others, including a number of very fine and moving short stories. Painful, because John Fante certainly was a flawed human being, as this biography clearly shows. To complain that Fante drank, or was lazy, or abused his wife, etc. is silly. What, we can or should only read books by people who are saints? If that's the criteria for what writers we read then there'd be nothing to read on the fiction shelves by either men or women. Should I refrain from reading Claire Boothe Luce or Dorothy Parker because they were less than perfect people? Should I dump my Dostoyevsky books simply because he treated everyone monstrously, or my Dickens, because he was a lousy father and husband? I'm sorry to destroy the illusions of the simpleton who wrote that review, but writers are sometimes petty, self-centered, back-biting, bores, many of whom drink to excess or gamble, or cheat, or womanize, etc., etc. If you want nice problem-free people to emulate go for film stars or musicians, or jocks, right? Maybe certain people shouldn't read biographies, but can instead continue to march along the primrose path believing idiocies like the writers they admire are as perfect as the works they create.

For this person to state something like: "There is nothing new or interesting here, not even a great work of art to point to and wonder. Cooper looks behind the curtain of Fante's existence, finding that whatever wizard we had imagined there had long ago crumbled to dust." --I'm sorry, but that's not even half intelligent, it's sheer wanton stupidity. Yeah, that's why John Fante has admirers from John Fowles all the way down.

Cooper's book gives us the externals that formed John Fante the writer. If that is uninteresting to the previous reviewer, that's sad. That he or she doesn't appreciate Fante work, and feels the need to attack it is pathetic. Fante will long outlast you, and I'd sure hate to see what lies on your bookshelves. Fante's books continue to sell and be reprinted, here in the U.S and in Europe. While there's no accounting for taste, there's no accounting for its absence in this case. Set Fante beside anyone who wrote in the 1930s or 1940s-Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc.-and you will see that Fante's writing is not dated, but is incredibly fresh. And while he writes a clean simple prose, at the same time there is poetry there, too. How many writers can you name who are capable of accomplishing that? Add Fante's humor, and you have writing that is a miracle. Sure there are passages that are cruel-life was very cruel for Mexicans, Italians, Philipinos, and others living in the U.S. all vying to fit in as Americans, to survive. And that was the world John Fante worked to depict in his writing. If that a failure of a life, then give me more failures!

Fante's writing is brilliant, but of course you have to have some taste to realize this. And if you've got any sense, you'll find it hilarious; it will make you laugh out loud, and yes, wince on occasion. It will move you, because there's an emotional content in his writing that is sorely lacking in 95% of the writers out there.

Stephen Cooper's biography is not adulatory. Instead, it's honest, as Fante's writing is honest. Cooper writes of the whole man, not a part of him. To the other reviewer who complained that Fante's fictions were so frequently full of fabrication, well, that's why they call it fiction, silly. People do themselves and Fante a huge disservice by assuming what he wrote was autobiographical. Fante clearly infused his character, his alter ego, Arturo Bandini, into a framework wherein he used bits and pieces of real life, but his writing is not a mirror of his life. John Fante the person is not the same as John Fante's writing. Again, for those of you who are troubled by the definitions of `novel' and `fiction,' he made it up.

I say hats off to Stephen Cooper for writing a good solid biography of a man who deserves a much wider audience. Perhaps when the film Ask The Dust comes out in December, and Robert Towne doesn't blow it, that will happen.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Long Overdue Look At The Life Of John Fante, March 23, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante (Hardcover)

Stephen Cooper discovered "Ask the Dust" when he was 25 and like most who have encountered the novel, was profoundly effected. A quarter century later, he lays some thorny roses at the grave of John Fante with a clear eyed look at the man who's bifurcated personality produced some of the most raw and beautiful prose of the 20th. Century, as well as countless drunken, destructive rages. Cooper has studied his subject exaustively and with the assistance of Fante's widow Joyce, he gives us our first look at a life and a talent that spun away from it's early, hungry promise to the deadly distractions of Hollywood, the links and the drinks. Fante's life, in many ways, is full of more rugged pathos and sour beauty than that of the Bandini persona that he wove through his too few novels. Cooper has done a magnificent job as the first biographer of John Fante but it is a testament to this uniquely complicated man that it should not suffice as the only volume on the shelf.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Read and Valuable Contribution, March 12, 2006

By 

Peter Richardson (San Francisco Bay Area) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante (Paperback)

I hope the interest in "Ask the Dust" (reprint and Hollywood film) will send many readers to this excellent biography. If you want to learn more about Fante and the Los Angeles literary and screenwriting scene of his era, this book is a gold mine. Recognition came late for Fante, and it wouldn't have come at all without Charles Bukowski's advocacy, but this biography, Robert Towne's feature film, and the Independent Lens documentary that aired recently on PBS ("A Sad Flower in the Sand") are helping to rectify the critical neglect. Two comments on the other reviews. Yes, it will be useful in the classroom. I just taught "Ask the Dust" in a course at San Francisco State University, and this work was a huge help. And to those who could do without the endnotes, they were indispensable for me as I researched the life of Fante's friend Carey McWilliams.