John Fante: Downtown LA Writer John Fante to be Honored with a Square outside the Main Library

Downtown LA Writer John Fante to be Honored with a Square outside the Main
Library

LOS ANGELES- Yesterday in City Hall, Los Angeles City Councilmember Jan
Perry put forward, and Jose Huizar seconded, a proposal to name the corner
of Fifth and Grand, outside the Central Library, JOHN FANTE SQUARE -- an
overdue and fitting honor for a great writer who for too long has been more
famous in his father's native Italy than in his own adopted home of Los
Angeles. The request now goes to the Public Works Committee for final
approval. Soon, Fante lovers can hope to see official city signs designating
JOHN FANTE SQUARE erected at the base of the writer's former home on Bunker
Hill.

John Fante (1909-1983) was Charles Bukowski's favorite writer, his "Ask the
Dust" was the book Robert Towne wanted to film after "Chinatown" (it finally
was made in 2006 starring Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek, and Donald Sutherland)
and he is honored with an annual festival in Italy‹but in 21st Century Los
Angeles, his name often gets a shrug. That's too bad, because Fante might be
the funniest, most heartwarming, honest and appealing writer to ever take
this city as his subject.

Colorado-born, first generation Italian-American John Fante arrived in Los
Angeles at the start of the depression, and found a room on Bunker Hill, the
now-lost Victorian neighborhood above Downtown where he met and mingled with
the fascinating characters who would come to inhabit his fiction.
Desperately poor, the young writer would walk down Grand Avenue from his
apartment in the Alta Vista (called the Alta Loma in "Ask the Dust") to the
newly built Central Library (1926), where at no cost he fed his passion for
poetry and the novels of Knut Hamsun. For this reason alone, it would be
fitting that corner of Fifth and Grand be designated John Fante Square.

But the Central Library would go on to play a still greater role in Fante's
literary legacy. First, in the 1940s, a young Charles Bukowski found "Ask
the Dust" on the shelf in the main reading room and was transported. In
Fante, Bukowski found a naturalistic, self-deprecating Los Angeles voice
that inspired him to become a writer, and to listen to the voices of the
ordinary people in the bars and on the streets. Many years later, Bukowski
would mention the great John Fante (he called him "my god") to his publisher
John Martin, who was unable to locate Fante's out-of-print books. So
Bukowski went back to the Central Library, took "Ask the Dust" off the
shelf, and photocopied it for John Martin. Martin promptly bought the rights
and the Black Sparrow Press edition fanned the embers of Fante's small fame
until it burst into renewed flames in the 1980s.

Now almost all of John Fante's novels and short stories are back in print
and selling steadily in Europe and America. "Ask the Dust" was finally
filmed, with Bunker Hill built as a set in South Africa. He was the subject
of Stephen Cooper's acclaimed biography, an annual John Fante literary
festival is held in his father's hometown of Torricella Peligna (Italy), the
bus adventure company Esotouric dedicated a tour to following in his
footsteps, and on the occasion of the writer's centennial in Spring 2009,
UCLA Special Collections obtained his papers.

And with the naming of a prominent Los Angeles intersection in his honor,
John Fante joins the august company of the city's most celebrated scribes,
including Raymond Chandler (whose Square is at Cahuenga and Hollywood) and
Billy Wilder (whose Square is at Sunset and La Brea).