The road to john fante’s los angeles

Originally offered as the 2011 Endowed Bonnie Cashin Memorial Lecture at UCLA Library Special Collections, this talk consists of two parts: an overview of John Fante’s life and times, and a behind-the-scenes account of the work Cooper did in researching his biography of Fante. Confiding to his audience that any biography is to some degree autobiographical, Cooper tells of his own youthful infatuation with Ask the Dust and how that feeling developed into the central project of his professional life both as a writer and a teacher. The revised version of the talk that is presented here leads up to the disclosure of a mystery surrounding the John Fante papers, a mystery that persists to this day.