This chapter shows how the booster myths of early Los Angeles literature grew in scale and potency alongside the city itself, not least as Hollywood came increasingly to exemplify shimmering vacuity and false promise in the public imagination. Critiques of such a city arrived both either side of World War II from a welter of writers including Upton Sinclair, Don Ryan, William Faulkner, Myron Brinig, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Budd Schulberg. Gustafson notes that 1939 marked a golden year for LA literature, with the publication of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, John Fante’s Ask the Dust, and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. Less remarked upon historically, but surfaced by Gustafson here, this is also the period in which a more diverse vision of LA literature began to emerge, as the city became a setting and subject in writings by racialized minority authors like the African American Chester Himes and Filipino American Carlos Bulosan.