John Fante

Writer

• Born: April 8, 1909
• Birthplace: Denver, Colorado
• Died: May 8, 1983
• Place of death: Woodland Hills, California

Biography

John Fante’s career as a writer spanned over fifty years and encompassed a life of recognized literary merit for Fante’s critically successful novels and complex short stories. However, Fante was also known as a film writer of distinction. An Italian American, Fante struggled with his immigrantroots throughout his life. This struggle helped him develop a fictional alter ego who explores not only the issues of his guilt-plagued Italian American and Catholic heritage but also the conflicts inherent in being a writer. His work focuses on the angst of creation and the reality of being human in a morally ambiguous world. A recurring theme in Fante’s work is the repetitive cycle of sin, guilt, and forgiveness and absolution.

Fante was the eldest of four children of Nicholas Fante and Mary Capolungo Fante. His Italian-born father was a bricklayer by trade, and his mother was a Chicago-born Italian American. Fante attended parochial schools in Boulder, Colorado, where he exhibited a flair for writing. He befriended and held as a mentor the famous H. L. Mencken, who published a great deal of Fante’s early fiction in American Mercury during the 1930’s. Educated at the Regis Jesuit College in Denver, Fante also attended the University of Colorado. After his family moved to Los Angeles, Fante took a position as dockworker in Long Beach, an experience that provided the groundwork for his novel The Road to Los Angeles. Soon after he began a protracted correspondence with Mencken. The fears and concerns he expressed in his letters highlight the same concerns of Fante’s literary persona in the character of Arturo Bandini, who is the hero of four Fante novels that chronicle the struggles of a young writer coming to terms with his conflicted existence. These novels, The Road to Los Angeles, Wait Until Spring, Bandini (considered Fante’s masterpiece), Ask the Dust, and Dreams from Bunker Hill all include his characteristic investigation into the nature of life, his depictions of his struggles to become a writer, and his comic stance on the world. In his stories (many of which are collected in the volume Dago Red), Fante creates minor jewels of narration that explore a young man’s disillusionment with the world of adult deception, the multifarious guilt involved with coming of age, and the nature of the possible absolution of sin and guilt through a transcendent forgiveness that God and the Church provide. Fante’s most successful work, Full of Life, not only chronicles his experience with his wife’s first pregnancy, but also was adapted as a screenplay and nominated for an Academy Award in 1957. In fact, Fante turned to screenwriting in 1940 when his first novels did not provide financial security, and he scripted films as Jeanne Eagles, The Reluctant Saint, My Six Loves, and A Walk on the Wild Side. Fante was “rediscovered” by his publishers, Black Sparrow Press, who put nearly all his works in print. Fante has been alternately compared to both William Saroyan and Sherwood Anderson in the sense that he has transformed his own ambivalences, insecurities, and negative experiences into textual art and insight into the human condition.