Either the work of John Fante (1909-1983) is unknown to you or it is 
unforgettable. He was not the kind of writer to leave room in between.

That is because of what his biographer, Stephen Cooper, has called "a style 
of deceptive simplicity, emotional immediacy and tremendous psychological 
point," a style that exultantly leaps off the page to captivate the reader. 
It won Fante (pronounced fahn-TAY) widespread but fleeting popularity during 
his lifetime and later a cult following, especially among Californians, 
writers and filmmakers. Charles Bukowski gave the Fante legend a leg up by 
proclaiming "Fante was my god" and having his fictional alter-ego in his 
novel "Women" cite Fante as his favorite author.

"Why did you like him?" someone asks in that novel. "Total emotion," replies 
Mr. Bukowski's protagonist. "A very brave man."

Although much of Fante's work was out of print during his later years, it has 
gradually come to be rediscovered. Mr. Cooper, who is to Fante what the 
critic Tim Page has been to Dawn Powell, first heard of Fante when reading a 
1974 article about the film "Chinatown," in which the screenwriter Robert 
Towne called Fante's "Ask the Dust" the best novel ever written about Los 
Angeles. Now, after publishing his biography of Fante, "Full of Life" (North 
Point), two years ago and editing two earlier Fante-related volumes, Mr. 
Cooper has assembled the definitive anthology. "The John Fante Reader" is 
poised to win him a well-deserved place in the mainstream.

Because so much of Fante's writing was furiously egocentric, Mr. Cooper has 
been able to give this anthology the engrossing air of an autobiography. The 
names of Fante's stand-ins change, but their brooding and posturing endure 
through a series of novels, stories and letters. 

By any name — Arturo Bandini in his youth, Henry J. Molise in middle age, 
John Fante himself when he dropped all pretense — the hero of these tales is 
a comically self-absorbed writer struggling with his Italian-American family, 
with Catholicism, with the allure and cruelty of an impoverished life in 
Southern California and with writing movies for "ex-pants manufacturers who 
had slashed my screenplays until blood oozed."

The diminutive Fante was born in Denver, the son of a bricklayer and his 
hard-working, submissive wife. "My father was very happy at my birth," Fante 
wrote in a letter to H. L. Mencken, who would become his literary mentor. "He 
was so happy that he got drunk and stayed that way for a week. On and off for 
the last 21 years he has continued to celebrate my coming."

The union of his parents always troubled him ("I pictured them lying there in 
the darkness of different worlds, sharing the same manger, like a burro and a 
hen"), and so did his Italian heritage. Of his first and most irresistible 
protagonist, Fante wrote: "His name was Arturo, but he hated it and wanted to 
be called John. His last name was Bandini, and he wanted it to be Jones."

Arturo Bandini figures in the extended, multivolume bildungsroman that 
commemorated the author's own progress. In the novel "Wait Until Spring, 
Bandini," Colorado is home, and family matters assume central importance. And 
Arturo's funny, outrageous delusions of grandeur begin at an early age, as 
when he discovers a picture of his mother in her youth. 

"I made up my mind that if I ever saw my mother as beautiful as she was in 
the picture I would immediately ask her to marry me," he decides. "She had 
never refused me anything, and I felt she would not refuse me as a husband."

Though the tone can be playful, poverty and domestic violence are very much 
part of the story, as is the scorn that Arturo feels for his Italian roots . 
After provoking his father and suffering the old man's wrath, Arturo thinks: 
"A Wop, that's what my father is! Nowhere is there an American father who 
beats his son this way."

The novel "1933 Was a Bad Year" and assorted short stories complete the 
picture of Bandini's boyhood. But by the time he reaches "The Road to Los 
Angeles" he is evolving into the ambitious, grandiose, self-mocking young 
adventurer who is Fante's most indelible creation. Here is the alarmingly 
Nietzsche-inspired Bandini who regards himself so highly as to imagine his 
mother's wedding ring a soon-to-be-coveted treasure. 

"Little did this piece of stupid metal know its own significance," he muses. 
"And yet someday it would become a collector's item of incalculable value. I 
could see the museum, with people milling around the Bandini heirlooms, the 
shouting of the auctioneer, and finally a Morgan or a Rockefeller of tomorrow 
raising his price to $12 million for that ring, simply because it was worn by 
the mother of Arturo Bandini, the greatest writer the world has ever known." 
As Mr. Cooper rightly points out in the biography, there are times when 
Bandini can be "a walking, talking buzz saw of megalomaniacal blab."

In "Ask the Dust," Bandini's ambitions reach their peak — as had Fante's. 
Having accosted Sinclair Lewis at Chasen's and solicited Mencken's attention 
with taunts and entreaties, Fante typically announced in a letter that he 
intended to replace Mencken as editor of The American Mercury. "The only 
hitch in the plan," he wrote," is that should you ever decide to quit the 
job, the magazine is liable to go on the rocks, so for God's sake stick 
around a while longer. Put your rubbers on and button up your overcoat." That 
combination of tenderness and outlandish hubris was purely his own.

"Ask the Dust," in which the 20- year-old genius in training comes to terms 
with love and desire while furthering his career on the basis of a story 
called "The Little Dog Laughed" ("a story to make you die holding the page, 
and it wasn't about a dog, either"), was published in 1939. So were "The Big 
Sleep," "The Grapes of Wrath" and "The Day of the Locust," yet Fante was able 
to make his mark. 

By that point his literary credentials seemed well established. But Fante had 
begun to squander his energies on screenwriting, often in collaboration with 
other writers. This is how he describes reading the result of such teamwork: 
"I was down the first page halfway when my hair began to stiffen. In the 
middle of the second page I was forced to put the script away and hang on to 
the porch banister."

Fante worked on Orson Welles's legendary debacle, "It's All True," and 
received a smattering of screen credits, most notably for "Jeanne Eagels." As 
he put it, "Those were the fat carnal days of the scribbler, and money was 
piling up with Thursday coming once a week, bringing my agent full of wit and 
camaraderie and what was left after he and the government cut up the 
Paramount check."

But he also grew increasingly bitter ("I am now a complete and ungarnished 
hack," he wrote to his friend William Saroyan) even while living with his 
family in Malibu and concocting wry, sunny stories of domestic bliss. "The 
wild, carefree author, filling his days with exquisite sensuality," he wrote 
of a trip to the grocery store. 

"Full of Life," Fante's humorous novel of family life, was a certifiably 
heartwarming hit, and became a movie starring Judy Holliday as the author's 
wife.

Mr. Fante's actual wife, Joyce Fante (to whom Mr. Cooper's anthology is 
dedicated), apparently knew better. The real Fante was often a darker 
character than his fiction acknowledged, whiling away time with drinking, 
gambling and golf. (He acquired the reputation as a powerful pre-Beat writer 
in spite of his golf habit.) 

He could be noxiously bigoted, as he is in references to his black 
daughter-in-law. And his depictions of Joyce could be simultaneously loving 
and savage. In "West of Rome (My Dog Stupid)," in which he calls her Harriet, 
he writes about the family's home: 

"It was paid for, right down to the last sprinkler head, and I had an 
overwhelming passion to dump it and get out of the country. Over my dead 
body, Harriet always challenged, and I often amused myself with wistful 
reveries of her lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor as I dug a 
grave out by the corral, then grabbing an Al Italia for Rome with several 
thousand bucks in my jeans and a new life on the Piazza Navone, with a 
brunette for a change."

Fante did live in Rome during the summer of 1960, working on something for 
Dino De Laurentiis. By then he learned he had diabetes and had to be vigilant 
about his diet, but the disease took a terrible toll. Blind and legless by 
the time he died in 1983, he could still joke about writing autobiographical 
fiction. He pretended he might write about his last days and call the book 
"Fante's Inferno."

Of all the subjects he tackled, none brought the best out of Fante more than 
writer's block. He was paradoxically eloquent and effusive about 
wordlessness, making it a haunting symbol of any artist's isolation. In one 
wonderfully emblematic passage, he convinces himself that if he can just 
write a single perfect sentence, and then another, and then another, he will 
be free of his demons. 

So he sits down to his typewriter, blows on his fingers and types out a verse 
of "The Walrus and the Carpenter": "I looked up and wet my lips. It wasn't 
mine, but what the hell, a man had to start someplace."