This chapter explores the Jewish American literature of Los Angeles by contrasting it with the more prominent Jewish literary traditions of New York and Chicago. Birns delves into the complexities of Jewish life in the city as represented in the works of Harris Newmark, Aben Kandel, Nathanael West, Budd Schulberg, and Eve Babitz. He also addresses the contributions of genre fiction writers like Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Rochelle Krich, and Walter Mosley, and concludes by considering the differing approaches to history and memory offered in prose by Gina Nahai and Harry Turtledove, and in poetry by Boris Dralyuk. Birns suggests that, while the Jewish literary tradition of Los Angeles may not have commanded a level of attention to match those of other American metropolises, it is a powerfully future-facing tradition, resisting assimilative impulses and engaging consistently with multicultural and diasporic paradigms.

This chapter’s wide-ranging account of the Latinx literary history of Los Angeles offers a narrative that is both spatial and temporal. It draws a throughline from the Spanish-language newspapers of the 1870s to modern and contemporary narratives of barrio life (Yxta Maya Murray, Mona Ruiz, Miguel Durán) and the transnationalism of Héctor Tobar and Graciela Limón. López-Calvo and Sae-Saue highlight the irony that despite the centrality of Latinx histories and communities to LA’s development, histories indeed that precede the city becoming “American,” Latinx writing has always been treated as a marginal part of its literary history. This body of literature, the chapter argues, not only records and memorializes the persistent spatial and social marginalization of LA’s Latinx communities but acts as a refusal of such processes, becoming in itself the community of political resistance it so often represents.

It is little wonder that Los Angeles, a city of compulsive self-narration, has birthed a tradition of autobiographical literature with local particularities. A uniquely LA tradition of memoir, autobiography, and autofiction come to the fore in this chapter. Allmendinger identifies three key strands of LA life writing: the Hollywood tell-all (Barbara Payton, Christina Crawford), the gang memoir, (Rafael Pérez-Torres, Freddy Negrete) and a third, more diffuse grouping – writings by women in which frank and personal explorations of gender and sexuality predominate (Eve Babitz, Maggie Nelson, Wendy C. Ortiz). While these three forms of reflection on lives lived in Los Angeles appear disparate, Allmendinger identifies in them a shared refusal of (White, male, straight) “master” narratives of Southern Californian consciousness.

In this chapter, Guy Zimmerman identifies innovative situated theater as a defining feature of LA drama, rebutting misperceived clichés about LA as a “placeless” city. Offering both a social history of 1980s and 1990s LA theater and extended readings of work by Reza Abdoh and John Steppling (alongside engagement with Luis Alfaro and Anna Deavere Smith), Zimmerman places LA theater within the broader context of the city’s unique cultural geography. He articulates how exemptions from union pay scales via the “Equity Waiver” partially liberated LA’s vibrant independent theater scene from market forces at a time when the rise of neoliberalism seemed to render such escape impossible, while also acknowledging how more recent years have applied yet greater economic and political pressures on artists attempting theatrical innovation in Los Angeles.

This chapter focuses the fractures in urban space created by racialized capitalism in the final decades of the twentieth century. Shoop distils discourses of neoliberal-era Los Angeles by drawing into dialogue the contrasting readings of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel proffered by Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis. Shoop explores Joan Didion’s expression of White paranoia over demographic changes as expressed in The White Album, setting Didion’s racial anxieties alongside the forms of Chicano resistance and historical memory articulated in Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit (1979). Shoop then examines how Carolyn See’s Golden Days (1986) and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) satirically criticize racial liberalism and suburban whiteness. The chapter concludes by discussing the fractured, global Los Angeles as it emerges in the wake of the 1992 LA Uprising, in Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997).

This chapter presents relationships between processes of both internal and international migration as a signature feature of Los Angeles literature. Through works by Facundo Bernal, Carlos Bulosan, Laila Lalami, and Nayomi Munaweera, Manizza Roszak reflects upon LA’s status a node of global migration. In the works of John Fante, Walter Mosley, Michele Serros, Charles Yu, Percival Everett, and Tommy Pico, meanwhile, questions of transnationality still surface, but are recontextualized by processes intranational migration both historical and contemporary – reflecting LA’s longstanding image as a destination of promise and opportunity. When racial or ethnic marginality inflects experience of the city, however, hopes for renewal and self-remaking rapidly turn to disappointment and frustration. Nevertheless, inter-diasporic solidarities remain.

This chapter circulates through LA’s infamously fragmented and sprawling form, deploying fiction and poetry as itself a body of literature that functions as a kind of spatial theory in its own right, while simultaneously enabling affective understandings of space. Murphet takes to the freeway, the city’s signature spatial symbol, and finds its promise of connectivity a failed one. In the literature Murphet explores, the freeway acts to atomize and segregate communities – reifying and compounding racial and social marginality. The Watts Writers Workshop, Nina Revoyr, and Thomas Pynchon map the neighborhoods of South Central LA; Helena María Viramontes navigates the Eastside barrios; and Karen Tei Yamashita situates LA’s internal networks (and disconnections) within transnational flows of capital and labor.

Weisong Gao identifies complex and ambivalent constructions of and reflections upon “home” as constituting a frame through which Los Angeles’s rich Asian American literary history can be understood. In Gao’s chapter, home is a sensory experience, felt in the body. Focusing on writers including Steph Cha, Hisaye Yamamoto, Lisa See, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Nina Revoyr, Gao interrogates complexities of cultural belonging and identity, and locates cross-racial tensions and solidarities, across a breadth of LA’s diverse Asian American literatures. Gao contends that while “Asian American” was a category initially created and defined in political terms, a sensory lens both enables a critical interrogation of that category and offers a means reaching deeper, more affectively, and more sophisticatedly into the complexities of Asian American history, experience, and relationality that LA literature manifests.

This chapter analyzes how authors addressed the countercultural and radical scenes that came to prominence in LA during between the late 1950s and the late 1960s. Saul notes that Joan Didion looked back on the 1960s and early 1970s as a period of moral and psychological decay. Meanwhile, though, Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964), Alison Lurie’s The Nowhere City (1965), and Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (1975) offered a more sympathetic and nuanced approach to the bewildering combination of social upheaval and liberatory promise that the city offered in this period – beyond the powerful dichotomy that Mike Davis would later call “sunshine and noir.” Saul presents the recent resurgence of interest in the works of Gavin Lambert and Eve Babitz as evidence of growing readerly appetites for a richer and more sophisticated literary picture of this complex moment in LA’s history, with Lambert and Babitz functioning as counterparts and counterpoints to Isherwood and Lurie respectively.

This chapter attends to Los Angeles’s long and varied history of journalistic writing. For Chihara, the LA Times, which grew in prominence along with the city itself in the early decades of the twentieth century, incubated writing about the developing city not only in its own pages but also in the resistive responses to its advocacy on behalf of capital. Chihara then turns her attention to the New Journalism-era writings of Joan Didion and Eve Babtiz, in which personal positionality is as unapologetically present within text as within the city – even as the two differed markedly in their subjectivities and styles. In Jonathan Gold’s restaurant reviews of the 1990s and 2000s, food is only ever part of the story: Gold uses the global tastes and smells of LA’s culinary culture to hymn, critique, and grieve the city itself. In conversation with writer Matthew Specktor, Chihara considers the material challenges faced by contemporary writers in Los Angeles – the decline of traditional journalism; the rising cost of living; corporate consolidation of creative industries – and wonders if careers in LA reportage like those of Didion, Babitz, and Gold are still possible.

In this chapter, Bill Mohr examines a longstanding Los Angeles poetic ecosystem that, instead of pleading for cultural legitimacy at the feet of East Coast tastemakers, has always rejected the doctrinaire. The renegade versification of LA, Mohr argues, is exemplified by deep investments in performance cultures and recorded media – rejections of print culture’s hegemony notwithstanding LA’s own vibrant magazine and small press culture. Mohr ranges over the Beat-adjacent Venice scene of the 1950s, the Black poets who emerged from Watts in the 1960s, the punks of the 1970s and 1980s, LA’s motive role in the development of “Stand Up” poetry, the queer poetics of Eloise Klein Healy and Judy Grahn, Charles Bukowski’s dissolute verse, Douglas Messerli’s Language poetry, and the recordings of Harvey Robert Kubernik’s Freeway Records. Through this diverse history of unconventional scenes and approaches, Mohr shows, LA has developed an entirely unique poetic culture.

This chapter offers a history of critical and theoretical writing about the literature of Southern California. Docherty argues that the origin point for LA literary criticism is not, as often supposed, Edmund Wilson’s The Boys in the Back Room (1941) but USC MA student Margaret Climie’s 1925 thesis. Early critical responses to LA’s literature, including those of Climie, Wilson, and Franklin Walker, at least acknowledged that literature existed in Southern California, but largely dismissed its quality. Docherty identifies David Fine as the critic who embodied LA literary studies’ coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, but argues that Fine contoured an LA canon subject to certain limitations of form, period, and social perspective. Since the turn of the millennium, the chapter shows, increasing numbers of scholars have offered multiethnic and multiformal critical approaches to LA writing commensurate with the kaleidoscopic diversity of the city’s contemporary literature and indeed the city itself.

In this chapter, Nicole Seymour and Zia Salim observe that two paradigms dominate the cultural imagination of Los Angeles’s environmental conditions. One is a suspicion that the city’s “nature” is troublingly artificial – a water-hungry metropolis imposed on what is often erroneously described as a desert. The other is a notion of LA as environmentally extreme, disastrous, and even apocalyptic, not only in its wildfires but also in tectonic activity, drought, and flood. These paradigms often overlap, human action reaping a harvest of natural disaster. Through a capacious literary archive that stretches chronologically from Don Ryan’s Angel’s Flight (1927) to Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (2021), however, Seymour and Salim find that LA literature does not always propagate these twin paradigms uncritically; rather, they are often challenged and complexified.

This chapter explores the rich history of LGBTQ+ writing in Los Angeles – and demonstrates how that literary history is inextricably bound up in a history of political activism. Edgar presents the history of queer LA literature as one that begins with the landmark ONE Inc. v. Olesen case of 1958. In this watershed struggle for free speech, the LA-based gay magazine ONE struck a blow of free speech and against the suppression of queer culture. The chapter positions ONE Inc. v. Olesen as the origin point in the story of queer literary LA, an arc that then stretches through such writers invested of such varying formal, stylistic, and political inclinations as John Rechy, Gore Vidal, Brett Easton Ellis, Eloise Klein Healy, Nina Revoyr, Gil Cuadros, and Michael Nava.

Los Angeles literature’s historically marginal place in the American canon can partly be attributed to the prominence of “popular” literatures in its cultural production. Perhaps no literary genre has made such a dramatic journey from critically dismissed literary margins to the critically lauded literary-lauded mainstream as science fiction, a genre in whose development Los Angeles played a significant role, as David Sandner demonstrates throughout his chapter. Sandner’s narrative takes us from early zine culture in the 1940s and 1950s, via Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (famously written at UCLA on rented typewriters), to countercultural works of the 1960s and 1970s. Beyond this point, Sandner identifies LA, in all its multiethnic complexity, as playing an inevitably central role in the genre’s diversification, represented in the form of Ernest Hogan’s pioneering Chicano science fiction and Pasadena native Octavia Butler’s frequent collocation of Southern California settings with both speculative worlds and speculations on Blackness. Other counter-futures and alternate histories are found in works by Kim Stanley Robinson and Sesshu Foster.

This chapter offers an analysis of Los Angeles writings by a multiethnic selection of female authors from the mid twentieth century to the contemporary moment. Kim Lee frames LA’s creeping, obfuscating fog as denotative of a signature paranoiac mood in LA literature, and reads that foggy, blurry spatiality as a gendered experience. From the fatally obscured streets of Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947) to Myriam Gurba’s use of fog, both mental and physical, as a space in which both attacker and victim can hide in Creep (2023), LA becomes legible as a city where sexual violence hangs in the air. Elsewhere, Kim Lee locates a similarly paranoid mode in writings by Joan Didion, Octavia Butler, Helena María Viramontes, and Karen Tei Yamashita.

This chapter explores the contemporary literature of Los Angeles. It demonstrates that the toxicity of the California Dream, already present in nineteenth-century booster romances, has not been attenuated by time. If anything, this chapter claims, LA as represented in its literature has only grown murkier, both atmospherically and psychologically. Hicks exposes distortions of the city’s realities, inequalities, and historical origins in novels such as Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009), James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning (2008), and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015). Likewise, explains Hicks, the protagonists of futuristic novels by Claire Vaye Watkins, Michael Tolkin, Ben Winters, and Alexandra Kleeman succumb to collective fantasy, amnesia, delusion, and dementia.

This chapter endeavors to acknowledge that, while English-language writing has come to dominate assessments of LA’s literary history, that city is and always has been, like the city itself, a polyglot one. Cutler and Leong present writing in Japanese and Spanish as defining examples of LA literary multilingualism. In the histories of LA’s Spanish-speaking and Japanese-speaking populations, the chapter identifies fiction, poetry, and periodicals as key (and interrelated) forms of literary production – enabling communities to recognize themselves and collectively reflect upon ambiguous relations to Los Angeles and America at large. Novels by Daniel Venegas and Shōson Nagahara are explored, but Cutler and Leong also explain how newspapers and chronicles have represented shared translocal experiences, not only in the form of conventional reporting on current events but also as venues for poetry.

Los Angeles literature’s historically marginal place in the American canon can partly be attributed to the prominence of “popular” literatures in its cultural production. This chapter addresses the literary tradition with which LA is perhaps most frequently associated, especially in the popular imagination: crime fiction, in the lineage established by Raymond Chandler. Norman observes how, in Chandler’s genre-defining writings, Los Angeles is charted as a topography of absent, empty, alienated spaces – establishing enduringly powerful visions of the city. Norman then turns to Ross Macdonald’s debts to and departures from Chandler, the complex nostalgia for a midcentury city built upon White supremacy that animates James Ellroy’s police procedurals, and Walter Mosley’s transformative reconfiguration of the iconic lone private eye as an African American.

Such are the idiosyncrasies and ambiguities of Los Angeles’s sociospatial conditions that they have birthed a body of nonfiction writing dedicated to understanding them. This chapter presents such works as a distinct literary tradition. Dimendberg identifies the 1930s, when Los Angeles matured into a metropolis, as the period in which a range of now-familiar (and mostly negative) tropes about the city solidified, while the German geographer Anton Wagner marveled at how rapidly LA’s urban fabric was changing. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams offered a clear-eyed portrait of Southern California that remained alive to its flaws and inequalities, but his assessment was far fonder than those of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In the 1970s and 1990s respectively, Reyner Banham and Mike Davis offered contrasting images of the city. Banham was among the first theorists to champion LA’s uniquely spatialized mode of city living as for the most part a success. Davis, meanwhile, embodying the critical urbanism of the LA School of Geography, excoriated its violent underpinnings and enduring carcerality.