SOURCE: Mangan, Gerald. “Artist of the Fallen World.” Times Literary Supplement (20 March 1987): 303.

In the following review, Mangan traces Fante's literary development.

I decided to eat at Jim's Place, because I still had some money. I ordered ham and eggs. While I ate, Jim talked.

He said “You read a lot. Did you ever try writing a book?”

That did it. From then on, I wanted to be a writer.

“I'm writing a book right now”, I said.

He wanted to know what kind of a book.

I said “My prose is not for sale. I write for posterity.”

John Fante was twenty-two when he gave this dry account of budding aspirations, in an early chapter of The Road to Los Angeles (1933), a first novel that remained unpublished until after his death in 1983. The narrator is Arturo Bandini, the endearingly vainglorious hero of the trilogy now reprinted as the...