Literature
Los Angeles's literary history includes legendary authors like Raymond Chandler, whose hard-boiled detective stories were set in pre-war and immediate post-war L.A. Ross Macdonald carried on the Chandler tradition into the 1950s, and in the 1960s and 1970s blended it with themes of classical tragedy. Walter Mosley, James Elroy and Joseph Hansen are among the local successors to Chandler. Nathaniel West's book, The Day of the Locust, depicted a raw side to the Hollywood dream. Ray Bradbury wrote science fiction after moving to the city in 1934. Actress Carrie Fisher has found success as a novelist. The best known local poet was Charles Bukowski, who mostly lived in Hollywood but in the later part of his life lived in San Pedro. Tens of thousands of screenplays have been written by L.A. city residents, and the movie business has attracted many authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Tennessee Williams, Evelyn Waugh, and William Faulkner.
Los Angeles boasts a plethora of independent bookstores like Book Soup and Skylight Books, as well as a number of literary magazines like The Los Angeles Review, Slake, The Santa Monica Review, and Black Clock. Los Angeles has many public library branches, including the architecturally-renowned Central Library.
Read more about this topic: Arts And Culture Of Los Angeles
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
““If Steam has done nothing else, it has at least added a whole new Species to English Literature ... the booklets—the little thrilling romances, where the Murder comes at page fifteen, and the Wedding at page forty—surely they are due to Steam?”
“And when we travel by electricity—if I may venture to develop your theory—we shall have leaflets instead of booklets, and the Murder and the Wedding will come on the same page.””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.”
—P.D. (Phyllis Dorothy)