The Big Hunger
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Published here for the first time, this text presents a collection of recently-discovered stories by John Fante.
Gathered from surviving manuscripts and magazine files, the volume assembles seventeen uncollected works alongside the complete prologue to Ask the Dust.
The selections follow the author across three decades, tracking his portrayals of immigrant families and struggling young artists.
These narratives move between early Colorado kitchens, Depression-era Los Angeles rooming houses, and the sunlit fields and rail yards of northern California.
- Short Story Collection: Spans from 1932 through 1959.
- Working-Class Realism: Follows Filipino stoop-laborers in the San Joaquin Valley, cannery workers on harbor docks, and Colorado bricklayers facing unpaid grocery debts.
- Mid-Century California: Spans from the boarding houses and municipal stairways of Bunker Hill to railroad bungalows along the tracks of Roseville.
- Also by This Author: Ask the Dust, Wait Until Spring, Bandini and The Road to Los Angeles.
John Fante
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.
More by John Fante
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