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Thank You Team Fromm! v Derek v Carla v Scott v Dawa v Herbert v - - PDF document
Thank You Team Fromm! v Derek v Carla v Scott v Dawa v Herbert v - - PDF document
6/25/20 Exploring the Golden State A Readers Journey Through California History Thank You Team Fromm! v Derek v Carla v Scott v Dawa v Herbert v Alfredo 1 6/25/20 Thank You Fromm Students! Rough Course Schedule v June 3: Discoveries v
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Rough Class Schedule:
v Intro and Questions (1:00-1:10) v Steinbeck (1:10 to 1:20) v John Fante (1:20 to 1:30) v Hammett & Chandler (1:30-1:55) v Break (1:55 to 2:00) v The Exiles (2:00-2:05) v The Seekers (2:10 to 2:20) v Science Fiction (2:20 to 2:25) v Wallace Stegner (2:25 to 2:30) v Charles Bukowski (2:30 to 2:35)
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Peak Steinbeck, 1935-1939
v Tortilla Flat, 1935 v In Dubious Battle,
1936
v Of Mice and Men,
1937
v Grapes of Wrath,
1939 (Pulitzer Prize)
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Derailed by Life
v Demoralized by
politically-charged readings of his work
v Reactionaries called
him a Marxist
v Many on the left
called him bourgeois, sentimental
John and Carol Split (1941) John Leaves California (1942) Divorce from Gwyn (1948)
Carol and John
Gwyn Conger and John
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Ed’s Shocking Death, May 11, 1948
He was never again the writer he had once been in the 1930s
v He got off track v Years of false
starts, distractions
v Paid considerable
alimony and child support by writing for magazines
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“To Carol, who willed it”
v Many years later, on
the eve of Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he received a telegram from Carol
v “Congratulations,” she
- wrote. “I always knew
that it would come to you someday.”
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John wrote back to Carol, telling her he had expected her note. He always knew she was still in his camp in the way that mattered most.
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Why John Fante Matters
v Struggling writer
in Depression-era Los Angeles
v Gifted novelist,
short story writer
v Best known for
Ask the Dust (1939)
Fante’s books reveal a forgotten Los Angeles, from Angel’s Flight to the vanished downtown scene.
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The Struggles of John Fante
v Scraped by on a
series of menial jobs
v Most notable in a
tuna cannery
v Grew obsessed with
tuna canning
Fante’s Struggles
v Wrote an unpublished
story, “Fish Cannery”
v Featured extensive
tuna cannery scenes
v A script: Miracle of the
Fishes, a “melodrama
- f the tuna fishing
industry”
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The outline of his unpublished “epic” changed over the years. Then, nothing happened. Fante warned his editor: “DON’T tell Steinbeck!”
The So-Cal Steinbeck, 1938-1940
v Published three well
received works
v Novels Wait until
Spring (1938) & Ask the Dust (1939)
v Short stories Dago
Red (1940)
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Fante’s Best: Ask the Dust (1939)
Ask the Dust A California classic. But, because it’s about Los Angeles, and not New York, it’s too often overlooked
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Then, Once Again, Nothing Happened
vHack screenwriting
to support family, cover gambling & bar debts
vObsessions with
golf, pinball, wasted productive years
The Struggles of John Fante
v Compounding woes, he
had an anti-talent for book titles
v Proposed calling one
“Ah, Poor America!”
v Wanted to title another
“Odyssey of a Wop”
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As a serious writer, he was forgotten for four decades.
Fante is Enjoying a Renaissance
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Los Angeles Poet Charles Bukowski put Fante back on the map
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Why “Dash” Matters
vAuthor of iconic
“hard-boiled” detective novels and short stories
vScreenwriter &
political activist
“Dash” and Film
vSignificant
influence on films
vGenres of private-
eye/detective fiction, mystery thrillers, and film- noir
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Many of his novels were set in San Francisco 891 Post Street Sam Spade’s Apartment
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Timing is Everything
vWarner released the
“talkie” The Jazz Singer (Oct. 1927)
vHenceforth, few
silent films would be made
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Fiction & Hollywood
vProducers grew
desperate for crackling dialogue
vHe sent everything to
Hollywood, 1928-
vHenceforth crafted
filmable plots
Lived in “the real world”
vSuffered decades of
debilitating illness,
- bscurity, poverty
vWent to Hollywood &
stopped writing
vChose to go to prison
rather than testify
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Raymond Chandler, 1888-1959
v Began writing at 44 v Mostly set in Los
Angeles
v The Big Sleep, 1939 v Farewell, My Lovely,
1940
v The Lady in the Lake,
1943
v The Long Goodbye, 1954
Chandler Becomes a Writer
v Like many writers,
Chandler seems to have been unsuited for any other career
v He tried, and failed,
at bookkeeping
v For one, he drank far
too much
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Chandler’s Work
v If Chandler doesn’t
make you love LA, no novelist can
v Critics disparaged him;
readers loved him
v Chandler immerses the
reader in a vivid, evocative Los Angeles
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Chandler Redefined Los Angeles as a Noir Place
v Prided himself as the
“first to write about Southern California in a realistic way”
v “To write about a
place you have to love it or hate it or do both by turns.”
Questions About Hammett and Chandler?
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Eugene O’Neill and Carla Monterey at Tao House, Danville, 1937-1943
- 1. Touch of the Poet, 1939
- 2. More Stately Mansions,
1939
- 3. Iceman Cometh, 1939
- 4. Hughie, 1941
- 5. Long Day’s Journey Into
Night, 1941
- 6. Moon for the
Misbegotten, 1943
Tao House Today, Danville
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Theodor Adorno at Berkeley The Authoritarian Personalilty (1950)
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Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles
v Left England,
1937, for Los Angeles
v In LA for 26 years
from 1937 (age 43) until his death in 1963 (age 69)
Aldous Huxley
vThe Doors of
Perception (1954)
vInterprets his own
psychedelic experience with hallucinogens
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Henry Miller at Big Sur, 1944-1963
vCreative new phase;
artistic rebirth
vStayed for 20 years! v“I get an idea a day
here”
vOlder, if reluctant,
influence on Beats
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Productive Big Sur Years
v Air-Conditioned
Nightmare, 1945
v Remember to
Remember, 1947
v 3-part autobiography
Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus, 1945; Plexus, 1949; Nexus, 1960
The Outside World Suddenly Intruded, 1961-1963
v Tropic of Cancer, 1934
(US release, 1961)
v Tropic of Capricorn, 1939
(US release, 1962)
v Notoriety meant
intrusions, sleeplessness
v Left Big Sur in 1963,
moved to Los Angeles
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Jack Kerouac: Complicated Iconoclast
vA gentle soul,
French Catholic, reclusive
vLiterary pioneer
- f spontaneous
prose
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Jack’s “Comeback Novel” Big Sur (1962)
v Unsparingly depicted
self-destruction
v Torn between desire
for solitude & fellowship
v Protagonist divides
time between Big Sur and North Beach
Big Sur (1962)
vHarrowing account
- f alcoholism
vHis character seeks
salvation
vThe real Jack, too vHe died of, at 47, of
alcoholism
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Why Ray Bradbury Matters
vCalifornia’s
foremost science fiction writer
vA Los Angeles
upbringing
vA Los Angeles
fixture
Ray Bradbury
v Characters from
marginalized groups
v Mexican Americans v African Americans v Gays and lesbians
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Why Bradbury Matters
v Concerned about
technology and dehumanization
v Staunch defender &
advocate of reading
v Technology
undermining democratic society
Fahrenheit 451
vToday things are
more bleak than he could ever have imagined
vNot necessary to
burn books because no one wants to read them anyway
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Why Philip K. Dick Matters
Astonishing output: 44 novels! 120 short stories Largely posthumous fame Blade Runner (1982) Total Recall (1990) Minority Report (2002) Scanner Darkly (2006) Adjustment Bureau (2011) Man in the High Castle (2015)
Recurrent elements:
v Alternate realities v Predatory corporations v Authoritarianism v Perceptions v Human nature v Consciousness v Doppelgängers
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Posthumous Fame
v Devoted much of his
creative energy in the 1950s to a series of realist novels
v None of them published
in his time
v Later characterized as
equal to Updike & Roth
Why Wallace Stegner Matters
vNovelist, historian,
short story writer, environmentalist
vOften called “The
Dean of Western Writers”
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Wallace Stegner
vPulitzer Prize,
1972, for Angle
- f Repose
vControversy
requires an explanation
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Why Charles Bukowski Matters
v We can no longer just
call him up at his home in LA
v But, before his death
in 1994, you could
v He welcomed the
interruptions
His poem “462-0614” read like an open invitation:
v“I don’t write out of
- knowledge. When the
phone rings I too would like to hear words that might ease some of this. That’s why my number’s listed.”
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An Impish, Self-Effacing Charm
v “I get many letters.
They often say: ‘Bukowski, you are so f___ed up and you still survive. I decided not to kill myself.’ . . . So in a way I save people.”
Why Bukowski Matters
v“So these are my
readers, you see? The defeated, the demented and the damned—and I am proud of it.”
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Anticipated a Prolific Afterlife
v In 1970, he wrote to
his editor: “just think, someday after I’m dead and they start going for my poems and stories, you’ll have a hundred stories and a thousand poems on hand. You just don’t know how lucky you are.”
The Afterlife of Bukowski
vHis 1994 death has
not impeded his productivity
vHe’s been more
prolific since death
vTen posthumous
poetry collections; more to come
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