Dan Fante

Dan Fante has lived a charmed life. He is a success despite himself. It would seem that he has prospered in everything he has tried his hand at. At one point in his life he was averaging around $25,000 per month in sales of computer supplies. He had a house on the beach in Southern California and a shiny sports car to drive around town and impress people with. All this aside, I wouldn't wish his life on anybody.

Dan Fante is an alcoholic. As such, a great deal of personal tragedy and hardship has followed him around during the course of his life and makes its way into the bulk of his prose. It wasn't until he was well into his thirties and was made to write a personal account of his life as part of his twelve step recovery program that he realized he had a talent for telling stories. The exercise involved him writing the narrative of his life for an hour each day at exactly the same time. Consequentially, Dan Fante does not consider himself a novelist. He describes himself as a writer of pages.

Below I've listed a number of titles written by Dan Fante as well as a seminal work of fiction written by his famous father, John Fante who Charles Bukowski cites as a major influence.


Dan Fante:

86'd : a novel

Kissed by a fat waitress : new poems

Short dog : cab driver stories from the L.A. streets

Mooch

Spitting off of tall buildings

Chump change


John Fante:

Ask the dust : a novel