Around the same time Didion settled down in his Malibu home and wrote about the infamous Santa Ana Winds, Luis J. Rodriguez had joined a street gang. Rodriguez’s memoir “Always Running: Gang Days in La Vida Loca, LAis set in the wild suburban sprawl of the San Gabriel Valley. This is an epic tale of family, brotherhood, prejudice, car-top shootings, and the neighborhood’s everyday pleasures of fields and swimming holes that still remind us of our recent rural past. Rodriguez gives us something rarely seen in a film set in Los Angeles: the richness and drama of working-class life.
So does another production in the San Gabriel Valley.Hunger class curse‘, Sam Shepard’s 1977 play about a family living on an avocado farm with a nearby highway. Literally decades later, Salvador Plasencia’s experimental his 2005 novelpaper peopleAnd finally, the San Gabriel Valley becomes the surreal setting for the story of Caribbean Fragoza’s outstanding 2021 collection.eat the mouth that feeds you”
Where can I get out of my car and explore the literary history of Los Angeles on foot?
Start at the west entrance of downtown’s Grand Central Market.You can see the cable car on your left angels flight, takes its name from the hugely popular detective story by Michael Connelly. Angel’s Flight takes you to Bunker Her Hill, the setting for many of his mid-20th-century LA novels. “Bunker Hill is an old town, a lost town, a shabby town, a town of swindlers.” Noir master Raymond Chandler I have writtenlong before the old neighborhood boarding house was demolished.
I love this place because it’s the closest to John Fante’s store.ask the dust, my favorite Los Angeles novel. Fante sets most of “Ask the Dust” in Bunker Hill and the downtown streets below, where protagonist Arturo Bandini meets his lover, Mexican waitress Camila. And here, in an office building above the market, Bandini buys a marijuana cigarette from his friend. A friend hides a stash in the inner compartment of the wooden legs.
Didn’t William Faulkner live in Los Angeles?
Faulkner came to Los Angeles write a screenplay. He famously called it “the world’s plastic anus” (I’m paraphrasing here). One of his favorite hangouts is just two blocks from Grand Central Market. It’s the stunning (and decidedly non-plastic) gallery bar at the Biltmore Hotel. Continuing my walking tour, you’ll find Pershing Square, a park facing Biltmore, featured in John Lethy’s pioneering novel about gay life.City of night”
