Los Angeles : A Literary History

This field-defining book represents an expansive and ambitious new paradigm in Los Angeles literary study. It offers innovative narratives of the city's complex and incalculably diverse (but often underappreciated) literary history, making sense of an everchanging global city through its everchanging literary culture.

No city occupies as many paradoxical positions in the popular imagination as Los Angeles. It is the new frontier and the end of the trail; it is American Eden and Babylon by the Pacific; it is by turns celebrated and condemned for its diversity; it is the city of perpetual renewal and the city of imminent apocalypse. This collection reveals LA in all its contradictions by documenting a literary tradition as kaleidoscopic and cacophonous as the city itself. The writings explored by Los Angeles: A Literary History record how a dusty cow town morphed into a global metropolis within a matter of decades, and how this unprecedented transformation came to define the experience of modernity. Los Angeles's literature has long gone underappreciated, the city's culture dismissed as flat and frivolous: this volume upturns that narrative, reshaping American literary history by resituating LA as its beating heart.