Lionel Rolfe In Search of Literary L.A. 1991 – Charles Bukowski

Description

Los Angeles has always been a better literary town than it gets credit for, and Lionel Rolfe’s In Search of Literary L.A. makes the case by wandering through the writers, eccentrics, exiles and bohemians who made the city their own. Originally published as Literary L.A., Rolfe substantially expanded the book for this 1991 edition, taking in Nathanael West, Henry Miller, Jack London, Aldous Huxley, Upton Sinclair, Robinson Jeffers, Ken Kesey and plenty of others. Rolfe wasn’t approaching Los Angeles as an academic looking in from the outside, either—he was a longtime L.A. journalist whose own history was tangled up with the city and its bohemian culture.

And then there’s Charles Bukowski, who gets one of the book’s best chapters: “Tales of an Extraordinary Madman.” Rolfe writes about discovering Bukowski through Notes of a Dirty Old Man and later coming to know him, accompanied here by a terrific photograph of Bukowski sitting on the floor of his cluttered Hollywood home—the same photograph used on the cover. It’s an especially nice piece of Bukowski ephemera because he’s presented where he belongs: not isolated as some literary celebrity, but firmly planted within the strange, sprawling history of literary Los Angeles.

For the Bukowski collector, Los Angeles collector, or anyone who knows there’s a hell of a lot more literary history in this town than Raymond Chandler.