This introduction articulates Los Angeles: A Literary History’s interrogation of the literary and cultural representations of Los Angeles using the image of fire that recurs powerfully throughout both the city’s history and its literature. Docherty and López-Calvo acknowledge the mythologized image of LA as a place of ephemerality and reinvention – often perpetuated by the white male authors of the mid twentieth century who have often been centered in the LA canon. Simultaneously, though, they present this book as one that challenges an overfamiliar cultural narrative of LA (and the narrowness of the literary corpus upon which it subsists). The introduction argues that Los Angeles is not merely a site of rupture and creative destruction but also one of complex spatial, temporal, social, and ecological connections. Docherty and López-Calvo frame the volume in its entirety as a call for (and attempt to demonstrate) a broader, deeper, more diverse and more nuanced literary history of Los Angeles that attends to all the city’s complexities and contradictions. The introduction then goes on to offer brief summaries of each chapter in the volume.