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A day and another day and the day before, and the library with the big boys in the shelves, old Dreiser, old Mencken, all the boys down there, and I went to see them, Hya Dreiser, Hya Mencken, Hya, hya: there's a place for me, too, and it begins with B, in the B shelf, Arturo Bandini, make way for Arturo Bandini, his slot for his book, and I sat at the table and just looked at the place where my book would be, right there close to Arnold Bennett; not much that Arnold Bennett, but I'd be there to sort of bolster up the B's, old Arturo Bandini, one of the boys, until some girl came along, some scent of perfume through the fiction room, some click of high heels to break up the monotony of my fame. Gala day, gala dream!
-John Fante, Ask the Dust
After more than half a century of silence from the academy, West Coast writer John Fante has finally begun to draw the critical attention he so richly deserves.1 With a critical foundation in place, we can now begin to ask more complicated questions of his work. Scholarship to date has largely been concerned with Fame's hyphenated ethnicity and how he negotiates an Italian identity in an American context; looking particularly at the Italian inflection of Fante's work, critics seem chiefly to locate him within an Italian-American framework. But some of the most illuminating work on the coming-of-age saga of his alter ego, Arturo Bandini, situates Fante in an American literary tradition.2 As his lifelong friend Carey McWilliams has famously said, Fante "is as American as Huckleberry Finn."3 While Fante is indeed preoccupied with what it means to inherit an Italian identity, his lineage as a writer is deeply American. Not only does he find in H. L. Mencken an icon of mentorship and in his library card a passkey to the foundation of American letters, Fante's debt to the culture he grew up in manifests itself on the page in ways that have not yet been adequately questioned. Fante's italianità is by no means irrelevant; his marginalized perspective gives us an entry into the deeply naturalized American traditions he writes from. Both inside and outside American culture,...