Literary References
In his mathematical fantasy short story "—And He Built a Crooked House—" author Robert A. Heinlein characterized Laurel Canyon (in the opinion of Hollywood residents) as:
"—where we keep the violent cases." The Canyonites—the brown-legged women, the trunks-clad men constantly busy building and rebuilding their slaphappy unfinished houses—regard with faint contempt the dull creatures who live down in the flats, and treasure in their hearts the secret knowledge that they, and only they, know how to live.
Heinlein gives the address of his protagonist in that story as 8775 Lookout Mountain Avenue, "across the street from the Hermit—the original Hermit of Hollywood" (i.e., himself).
In real life, during the early 1940s Heinlein's home on Lookout Mountain Avenue was the meeting place of the Mañana Literary Society, an informal but regular gathering of science fiction and fantasy authors. Considerable of Anthony Boucher's mystery novel Rocket to the Morgue (1942) revolves around such an SF writers' group, the characters being thinly disguised representations of the members who had gathered in the Heinlein house in 1940 and 1941, and scenes in the novel are thereby set in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood.
Read more about this topic: Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles
Famous quotes containing the word literary:
“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)