Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology: A Library of America Special Publication

For writers Los Angeles has always been a place of paradisal promise and apocalyptic undercurrents. Simone de Beauvoir saw a kaleidoscopic “hall of mirrors,” Aldous Huxley a “city of dreadful joy.” Where Jack Kerouac found a “huge desert encampment,” David Thompson imagined “Marilyn Monroe, fifty miles long, lying on her side, half-buried on a ridge of crumbling rock.”

In Writing Los Angeles, The Library of America presents a glittering panorama of the city, encompassing fiction, poetry, ess...