Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

David M. Fine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2000

The promotional literature that lured sun-starved midwesterners to Southern California in the 1880s hyped the region as the New Eden. But the novelists who created our vision of Los Angeles soon began to see it as Dystopia rather than Utopia, a corrupt, unreal city foreshadowing and reflecting all that is wrong with America. Now in the first literary history of Los Angeles in more than fifty years, David Fine traces the history of the place through the work of the authors who have defined it in our imaginations.

Fine begins with the mythifiers Helen Hunt Jackson, author of the quintessentially romantic Ramona (1884) and Mary Austin, whose 1917 novel The Ford was the first fictionalization of the theft of water from the Owens Valley that became famous sixty years later in the movie Chinatown. He devotes chapters to both early and later Hollywood novels, to crime and detective novels, and to immigrant, ethnic, and apocalyptic fiction, paying detailed attention to the fiction of Upton Sinclair, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John Fante, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, Budd Schulberg, Christopher Isherwood, Alison Lurie, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Walter Mosley, James Ellroy, Kate Braverman, and Carolyn See. The city’s history, its architecture, even its disasters are all part of the story.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David Fine is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. Among his previous books is Los Angeles in Fiction (UNM Press).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 294 pages
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press; 1st edition (August 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826322077
• ISBN-13: 978-0826322074
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #771,458 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ever Since Ramona, August 13, 2001

By 

Bruce Crocker "agnostictrickster" (Whittier, California United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (Hardcover)

I finished reading David Fine's excellent book Imagining Los Angeles: A City In Fiction at just before 2 am this morning. I was reading in bed in my 1923 bungalow in Whittier, California. It was a quiet night. No winds blowing; even the neighborhood dogs were asleep. It was too humid and Fine's wonderful analysis of Los Angeles fiction had my mind going a mile a minute. I thought about going for a drive; maybe listen to a little late-night radio, but I knew my wife would worry if she woke up and found me gone. I finally got to sleep, knowing I'd have to type up this report as soon as I got out of bed this morning.

Fine's book is not encyclopedic; if you are looking for a complete listing of SoCal fiction, you'll need to look elsewhere. Imagining Los Angeles is an overview - an introduction, a history with examples - of fiction set in the Los Angeles metro area. The first chapter gives you a little background on the area. Then Fine takes the reader on a literary journey from booster fiction, through fiction in the 20's, hard-boiled fiction, tough-guy detectives, the Hollywood novel and finishes with more ethnically oriented fiction and Los Angeles as a setting for disaster. The book is serious - probably not a summer beach read - but it also kept me in rapt attention and didn't read like the textbook Professor Fine could have turned it into. In my opinion, this book should appeal to a wide audience - from the serious literary student to the pop culture buff looking for a little backstory.

A lady just walked into my office (actually, my three legged female mutt just hopped into the 1980 guesthouse behind the bungalow) looking for my attention, so I better end this report now.

Sincerely Submitted, agnostictrickster 13 August 2001

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A terrific overview of LA fiction, July 6, 2001

By 

california-bookworm (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (Hardcover)

This is a terrific book, that rare academic work that is both entertaining and instructive. Having grown up in L.A., but no longer living there now, I truly enjoyed revisiting the city of my childhood and young adulthood via all the stories and authors Fine discusses. Fine's writing style is clear and blessedly free of academic jargon. His treatment of a wide variety of books and ideas is nothing short of a tour-de-force. "Imagining Los Angeles" does exactly what good literary scholarship should do: shine fresh light on books and their authors and make readers eager to discover the books for themselves! (I've just placed a mega-order for several of the titles Fine discusses... )

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review from THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, September 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (Hardcover)

"A short course in the essential literature of Los Angeles. . . . so full of punch and energy, so mercifully free of the impenetrable jargon that afflicts much scholarly and critical writing. Best of all, Fine sent me back to my old favorites with a fresh perspective, and he added a dozen titles to my own reading list."-Jonathan Kirsch, The Los Angeles Times