A Great L.A. Novelist, Often Overlooked Here, Is Huge In Italy

ONE OF THE best novels ever written about Los Angeles, according to many a literary critic, is John Fante’s Ask the Dust.

But these days, that novel, which was published in 1939 and tells the story of Arturo Bandini, an Italian-American writer in Bunker Hill during the Great Depression, is most fervently celebrated 6,300 miles away, in a remote town in the mountains east of Rome.

For the last 20 years, Torricella Peligna, population 1,000, has held an annual literary festival in Fante’s honor. It lasts for four days. This year’s event, which took place at the end of summer, had 35 sessions, with some drawing more than 500 attendees. Some of the offerings took place at the town’s library, which, of course, is named after Fante.

“People come from all over Italy and are often loyal fans who return year after year,” Giovanna Di Lello, the festival director, said by email. Past attendees have included not just academics and journalists, but also a pro soccer manager from Naples and multiple restaurateurs who — because apparently this is a thing people do — named their restaurants after Fante. The author’s family members also travel to the festival each year from the L.A. area.

Ask the Dust garnered positive reviews when it came out, including from a New York Times critic who called it “excellent.” But instead of leading to great things, what followed was crushing disappointment and near-oblivion. 

The year 1939, as it happened, was a great one for Los Angeles books. Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust both also came out that year. And some 100 miles north, Kern County was the setting for another heavyweight, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. 

Fante’s publisher, meanwhile, had a problem. The same year that Stackpole Sons published Ask the Dust, it also published a translation of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf — apparently without securing the rights. Houghton Mifflin, which owned the rights, sued. (Both publishers pledged that profits would go to support refugees from the Nazis.) 

Distracted by the battle, according to Alessio De Stefano, an Italian researcher who in July published the book John Fante Tapes, Stackpole did not throw much weight behind publicizing Fante’s novel. The book buzz fizzled out. 

After 1940, the Times didn’t mention the novel again until Fante’s obituary more than 40 years later.

The Colorado-born Fante might not have even gotten a Times obituary when he died in 1983 if not for the surprising intervention of another Los Angeles writer (and one not necessarily known for sentimentality), Charles Bukowski. 

When Bukowski was in his 20s, he came across a copy of Ask the Dust at the L.A. Public Library. He became fixated on Fante and eventually mentioned the novelist to his friend, journalist Ben Pleasants. Pleasants located Fante, who by then was around age 70, living in Malibu, and suffering from severe diabetes. 

Bukowski’s publisher, Black Sparrow Press, reissued Ask the Dust in 1980, leading to a rekindling of interest.

But Fante didn’t have long to enjoy his comeback. He died in 1983, though not before publishing another Bandini book, 1982’s Dreams from Bunker Hill. (A fourth installment, The Road to Los Angeles, written in the 1930s, was published posthumously in 1985.)

As Ask the Dust grew in popularity as a quintessentially L.A. story, its author developed an almost religious following on the other side of the world. After influential Italian publisher Giulio Einaudi Editore made Ask the Dust more widely available there in the early 2000s, “John Fante started having a new life in Italy,” said De Stefano, the researcher. 

That was especially true in Torricella Peligna, Fante’s father’s hometown. In 2005, after deciding to name the Torricella Peligna library after Fante, local officials conceived of organizing an annual literary festival in his honor.

Italians recognize themselves in Fante’s writing, according to Di Lello, who had made a documentary about the author prior to launching the festival. “He tells us a great deal about who we once were and the emigration we experienced,” she said by email. “We also appreciate the honesty and humor with which he addresses universal themes such as intergenerational relationships, his relationship with his father, the search for one’s place in the world, and the unease of being caught between two cultures.”

The local press covered this year’s festival, with one outlet calling the event “a cultural appointment of great regional and national importance.”

“There are so many people in Europe that appreciate and value his writing and know him,” said Fante’s daughter Victoria Fante Cohen. “You walk into a bookstore and they'll say, ‘Your father was John Fante?’ It's fabulous.”

A few years after the festival was founded, Los Angeles, too, decided it was time to recognize Fante. In 2010, the city of Los Angeles formally dedicated “John Fante Square” at the corner of 5th Street and Grand Avenue downtown, near the L.A. Public Library and not far from the streets of Bunker Hill his work made famous.

As the festival was getting started this year, Fante’s son Jim Fante said that he wished his father had been able to witness the reception his work has now both abroad and in L.A. “It's all gravy for us, but it's mixed feelings that he didn't get to enjoy this himself.”