Product Description

In this biography, the author sets out to untangle the enigma of an authentic American original. It traces the life of Fante, his writing career and his involvement with Hollywood and the likes of Orson Welles. It should help secure Fante's place in the international literary pantheon.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1108780 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

From the Back Cover
'Stephen Cooper's tender, angry biography may in a sense be Fante's finest novel.' The Herald

Full of Life is the first ever biography of John Fante, one of the great outsider figures of twentieth-century literature. By turns savage and poetic, Fante was the author of such classic underground novels as The Road to Los Angeles, Wait Until Spring, Bandini and Ask the Dust which is widely acknowledged to be his masterpiece.

Born in 1909 to poor Italian-American parents in Colorado, Fante survived the rigours of a traditional Catholic education before venturing west in 1930 to become a writer. Eventually setting down in Los Angeles's faded downturn area of Bunker Hill, his early work was championed by the legendary editor of the American Mercury, H.L. Mencken. However, he received little critical or commercial success for his progressive fiction and spent much of the '40s and '50s writing for Hollywood, a literary crime for which he never forgave himself. By the time of his death in 1980 he was nearly forgotten.

Both stylish and rigorous, Cooper's vivid biography explores and untangles the enigma of this contrary and brilliant figure and will help secure Fante's place in the international literary pantheon.

'Full of Life feels like a labour of love, resurrecting this unfairly marginalised figure in rich prose that reads more like a novel than a biography. Then again, his extraordinary life hardly lends itself to a dry catalogue of facts.' The Times

'Fante remains one of the greatest writers of all time and this biography is an excellent accessory to a wonderful body of work.' Uncut

'One of the lost souls of American letters, an author whose work has an almost legendary stature among writers and critics, but remains curiously unknown to the public at large.' Los Angeles Times

Customer Reviews

Well-written, unsentimental biography
I first heard of John Fante through a quotation at the start of "The Informers" by Brett Easton Ellis. The quotation was from the start of Fante's novel "Ask the Dust", and even in that short passage I could sense the passion, honesty and humour of the author. Now, having read all of the Bandini books, some other works by Fante, and this excellent biography, those qualities are very familiar to me.

Cooper is obviously a big fan of Fante, but he doesn't let that get in the way of his honest appraisal of the man. It is clear from Cooper's book that Fante could often be cruel and tyrannical as well as loving and excitable. The man portrayed here is the kind of man you would have expected to create the emotionally-charged characters Arturo Bandini and his Italian immigrant brick-laying father. Indeed, in this biography, in his early years Fante comes across as the real-life incarnation of Bandini, and in his later years, perhaps appropriately, he comes to partially resemble the tyrannical father figures of his work.

Another reason this biography is so fascinating is that Fante lived through a lot of upheavals in the history of America, such as the Depression, the Second World War and the Communist witch-hunts in Hollywood in the 1950s. Readers interested in writers and the process of writing will also find a lot to interest them here, as will people fascinated with Hollywood and the processes behind the movie industry. Central to the biography is the sadness felt by most fans of Fante's work, and obviously shared by Cooper, that he didn't gain the recognition as a writer that he deserved, and that he was forced to spend so much of his life churning out Hollywood scripts, a lot of which were never used.

Reading this book you get the impression that Fante never really gave up on his writing, and the section in which Cooper describes the older Fante, stricken with blindess, reciting his last ever novel to his wife, will give any fan of his work a pang of sadness. Reading this book, I was quite surprised to learn that Fante was actually still alive when there was a resurgence of interest in his work, partly inspired by one of his biggest fans, Charles Bukowski. It made me feel glad that Fante finally saw some late vindication of his novels (long after the initial interest in his early work fizzled out), but there is also a sadness to this turn of events because Fante was already nearing the end of his life.

This is a well-researched, well-written look at a fascinating figure who produced one of the classics of twentieth century American literature ("Ask the Dust"). It is also a very important book, and a step in the right direction of promoting awareness of an excellent writer who has been forgotten for too long.