SOURCE: Kirsch, Jonathan. “Down and Out in the City of Angels.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (3 March 2002): 2.

In the following review, Kirsch maintains that The John Fante Reader provides a useful introduction to the works of John Fante.

John Fante is one of those tragic figures of arts and letters whose best work was coldly and cruelly overlooked in his own lifetime, only to be “discovered” and celebrated long after his death. When Fante died at 74 in 1983, he had earned a bed in the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills by reason of his work as a journeyman screenwriter in the old studio system—“the most disgusting job in Christ's kingdom,” he once called it. But he also left behind a collection of novels and short stories so accomplished and so stirring that he is now compared favorably with Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway.

“John Fante...