Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp.
Chapter XXVI Our Literati
"[p. 347] About the time that Tad Goldberg and Bud Fisher were coming up in San Francisco as cartoonists, three authors were coming to the front in Los Angeles . . . Charles E. Van Loan, Willard Wright and James Willard Schultz.
"Mr. Wright [ -1939] is known to the reading public as S.S. Van Dine. A relative of H.E. Huntington, he came out of the university a pink-faced boy with the intellectual daring of a swash-buckling pirate. Millionaire Huntington did not recognize the light of genius but gave him a cap with a gilt band and a job as ticket-taker at the passenger gate of the Pasadena line of the Pacific Electric Railroad at Sixth and Main Streets. Waiting in the front rank of the commuters, one of the reporters of theLos Angeles Times fell into conversation with Wright and finally brought him on a visit to the newspaper office. At that time the managing editor of the Times was a Maine Yankee named H.E. Andrews. I have always been convinced that he had second sight. If he elected to send me out on a freight train to some lonely desert town that I could not find on the map, I knew from experience that there would be a murder on the platform as I stepped off the caboose. The minute his eye fell upon [p. 348] the boy in the ticket-taker's cap, Andrews called him to the desk and offered him the position of literary critic of the paper. Seldom has any American newspaper had a more brilliant or more ruthless writer. He delighted to fall upon a book of poems published at her own expense by some spinster school-teacher. He would print columns of extracts with grave editorial comments on the hidden meanings.
"The literary colony of the West was at that time in Carmel near Monterey-Mary Austin, Harry Leon Wilson, George Sterling, Jack London, Robinson Jeffers and many others. Wright had an audience. H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan were then editing Smart Set; they sent for young Wright and made it a trio. His candor and lack of inhibitions were a little too strongly flavored even for those sophisticates and the partnership broke up. While on Smart Set, Wright wrote the cruel but priceless essay called Los Angeles, the Chemically Pure, which young writers have been imitating ever since.
"After leaving the magazine he wrote a book on art history that has been recognized as a standard and authoritative work-perhaps the peak of his literary life; but it returned no dividends. Ill, poverty-stricken and thoroughly discouraged, he tried a detective story while ill in a hospital-and became both rich and famous overnight. [347]
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"[p. 352] Zane Grey [1872-1939] lives part of the time in Pasadena and at Santa Catalina Island. He is rather unfriendly to the literati and is never known to mingle."
[Zane Grey-One of the world's greatest prolific writers. Post Card Published by Norman Mead, 610 W. McLellan, Mesa, Arizona, KR, Franked and mailed at Phoenix, AZ, June 1, 1988, Bay Cities Postcards], 1939
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