Lionel Rolfe Literary L.A., Chronicle Books: San Francisco, 1981. 102 pp., Intro
Preface:
"No one has yet precisely pinpointed the literary tradition of Los Angeles; but then, L.A. itself is a hard place to pinpoint. Perhaps this is because L.A. became a major city of the world without having had a history that went back for centuries . . . The transitory aspects of the contemporary human condition have been institutionalized in Los Angeles . . .
". . . the modern condition is rootlessness . . . Even without Hollywood, L.A. might have fostered a literature of the brief encounter, the momentary assignation that sometimes ends up in seduction . . . Los Angeles has turned that [rootlessness] into a kind of powerful adaptive mechanism. Ebb and flow, a non-homogeneous collection of human types piled decades high upon the magnificient California landscape had to produce something distinctive . . ." p. ix