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While much of the local writing talent always seems to be harnessed to the film industry – even Faulkner and Fitzgerald were in LA primarily to make a living by writing screenplays – LA provides an immense wealth of irresistible material to writers. Bookworms will find that novels about the city make for fascinating reading.

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One of the most cynical novels about Hollywood ever written, Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust (1939) paints a noir picture of the savagery of Tinseltown.

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Los Angeles has been a favorite subject of novelists since the 1920s. Many have regarded LA in political terms, often viewing it unfavorably as the ultimate metaphor for capitalism. Classics in this vein include Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927), a muckraking work of historical fiction with socialist overtones. Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939) is a fine ironic work based on the life of publisher William Randolph Hearst (also an inspiration for Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane). F Scott Fitzgerald’s final work, The Last Tycoon (1940), makes scathing observations about the early years of Hollywood by following the life of a 1930s movie producer who is slowly working himself to death.

LA literature is, rightly or wrongly, also associated with pulp fiction. Raymond Chandler is the genre’s undisputed king. Start with The Big Sleep (1939) and after following Philip Marlowe, private eye, for one book, you may wind up reading all the others, too.

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Nobody could break down into simpler terms the psychology of SoCal’s culture of fads better than Dr Seuss (Theodor Geisel) in his story The Sneeches (1961). Visit his library at the University of California, San Diego.

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LATE 20TH CENTURY

Because of the great proliferation of SoCal-based authors, we’re just highlighting titles that feature the region. LA fiction’s banner year was in 1970. Terry Southern’s Blue Movie concerned the decadent side of Hollywood. Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays looked at Angelenos with a dry, not-too-kind wit. Post Office, by poet-novelist Charles Bukowski, captured the down-and-out side of Downtown. (Bukowski himself worked at Downtown’s Terminal Annex, Click here.) Chicano, by Richard Vasquez, took a dramatic look at the Latino barrio of East LA.

The mid-1980s brought the startling revelations of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, about the cocaine-addled lives of wealthy Beverly Hills teenagers. For a more comedic insight into LA during the go-go ’80s, pick up Richard Rayner’s Los Angeles Without a Map (1988), which follows a British man who gets lost in his Hollywood fantasies while chasing a Playboy bunny. Kate Braverman’s Palm Latitudes (1988) traces the intersecting lives of a flamboyant prostitute, a murderous housewife and a worn-out matriarch who maintain their strength and dignity against the backdrop of the violence and machismo of LA’s Mexican barrio.

Literary pulp fiction made a comeback in the 1990s. Walter Mosley’s famed Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), set in Watts, places its hero in impossible situations that test his desire to remain an honest man. Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty follows a Florida loan shark who moves to SoCal and gets mixed up in the film industry. Both stories – like many of the genre – translated brilliantly into film.

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Susan Sontag, the ‘Dark Lady of American Letters,’ spent her formative years in LA, although she lived much of her life in New York City; her much-sought-after papers were acquired by UCLA.

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21ST CENTURY

The novels of Carolyn See, who teaches at UCLA, are well crafted and inspiring. In The Handyman (1999), a frustrated artist becomes a not-so-good handyman who winds up repairing the lives of his clients, while There Will Never Be Another You (2006) is an interwoven tale of death and fracturing relationships in post–September 11 LA. Tara Ison’s The List (2007) is the darkly comic tale of a couple with a list of 10 things to do