Ask the Dust Format: Paperback

"Either the work of John Fante is unknown to you or unforgettable. He was not the kind of writer to leave room in between." — New York Times

"Fante was my God."—Charles Bukowski

John Fante’s classic California novel details the adventures of his alter ego, Arturo Bandini, a young writer in Great Depression-era Los Angeles. Struggling to succeed, Bandini falls into an obsessive love affair with the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Yet just as fortune looms with the publication of his first novel, everything falls apart when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears―propelling Bandini to reject the writer’s life.

John Fante began writing in 1929 and published his first short story in 1932. His first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, was published in 1938 and was the first of his Arturo Bandini series of novels, which also include The Road to Los Angeles and Ask the Dust. A prolific screenwriter, he was stricken with diabetes in 1955. Complications from the disease brought about his blindness in 1978 and, within two years, the amputation of both legs. He continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce, and published Dreams from Bunker Hill, the final installment of the Arturo Bandini series, in 1982. He died on May 8, 1983, at the age of seventy-four.