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In the company of writers, when the conversation turns to the serendipity of literary fame -- great writers unpublished; lousy ones celebrated -- sooner or later the name John Fante will come up. Not everyone will know of him -- not on the East Coast, anyway -- but those who do will respond with feeling. To them, he'll be one of the precious proofs of literary justice: a moral story illustrating all the ills of Hollywood and the immortality of talent; a rare and precious illustration that talent, no matter what the odds, will out.

Full of Life : A Biography of John Fante By Stephen Cooper North Point Press, 496 pages Nonfiction

As always with these stories of virtue rewarded, it's a three-act morality play. In Fante's case, it starts in 1930 when an impoverished young Italian-American man escapes his suffocating home in Colorado, armed only with a Jesuit high school education and the insane desire to write novels, and challenges Depression-era Los Angeles to deny him his glory. Flash forward to 1978, and Act 2: The aged hero sits in a wheelchair in his luxurious Malibu, Calif., house, having lost limb and eyesight to diabetes. Between the two scenes lies a lifetime of forgotten novels, buried by a career of soul-destroying screenwriting and a half-century of dedicated drinking and gambling, a brilliant talent wasted and forgotten. And then comes the last act.

In a throwaway line in his 1978 novel, "Women," the iconic Charles Bukowski -- the best-selling cult poet whose wild readings are the stuff of beat legends and whose epic drinking, fucking and writing were captured by Mickey Rourke in the movie "Barfly" -- mentions two utterly forgotten Fante novels, published respectively in 1939 and 1938: "Ask the Dust," and "Wait Until Spring, Bandini." These novels, it turns out, had sustained Bukowski 25 years before when, in the depths of his half-mad drinking days, he found them in the Los Angeles public library.

The mention sparks interest, notably that of Bukowski's publisher, America's foremost champion of the literary avant-garde, John Martin at Black Sparrow Press -- it was Martin who had discovered Bukowski in the '60s and turned him into one of America's bestselling poets. Martin acquires a copy of "Ask the Dust" and immediately sets about putting it back into print. And over the next 10 years, not only is Fante's forgotten life's work brought back to readers, but previously rejected works are published, new ones are written and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold to a cult audience in America and a mainstream one in Europe. It is a story everyone likes to hear.

Certainly it was a story that I couldn't resist. When, in 1991, I discovered Fante, I read his life's work one book right after the other. Here, I saw, was a writer as powerful as any in the American canon and far more subversive, more original and inventive than most. His voice ranged from gratingly raw honesty to a Thurberesque humor with the ridiculous figure of the writer himself -- particularly in his role as father and homeowner -- as its object. The language was astounding, always unsettling, always shocking in the beauty for which it reached again and again, the heights and depths of emotion it attained, and the risks it was prepared to take. To describe this writing as Dostoyevskian was not far-fetched; to identify it as among the finest fiction ever written in America was, for me, a certainty.

It was an unusually troubling discovery. On the one hand, I asked myself why Fante's writing had, despite its promise, fallen so completely out of print until John Martin's last-minute rediscovery. Why had he written so little after aiming so high? Why had an audience never found an author this talented, and what did this failure say about American literary life? Which of the Fante myths was true: the story of a true talent rewarded, or the story of how Hollywood, drinking and gambling destroyed a literary gem? Or was there another, even darker story -- the tale of an artist of passion and genius who, ultimately, was not equal to his own gifts?

And so, on two separate trips to California, I collected some interviews among major figures from Fante's life, like Joyce Fante, the writer's elegant, articulate wife and his finest reader, who has so beautifully and intelligently taken care of the work as she once took care of the writer. I spent a long night talking with Linda and Charles Bukowski in their San Pedro, Calif., living room over endless Heinekens and bidis. I met Edward Dmytryk, who directed key Fante screenplays ("The Reluctant Saint," "Walk on the Wild Side"); collaborator Harry Essex, most famous for "The Creature From the Black Lagoon"; and friend and co-writer Al Bezzerides, the legendary noir stylist.

They were wonderful trips. Not the least because, even from those who held Fante personally in less-than-perfect regard -- "a personality like a buzzsaw," was the way one interviewee described him -- I never heard a word of anything other than joy for the recognition he was receiving. I came to know the Fante story so well that Paul Yamamoto, the estate's literary agent, approached me about writing the authorized biography (a job I'd have taken in a flash if I'd had an academic salary to support me while I was doing it). And I became only more convinced that Fante was a great American figure who could and should and indeed must take his place in our literary canon next to James Farrell, Nathaniel West and William Saroyan.

But I never really settled my questions about success and failure in this writer's career. And so, 10 years later, when I received "Full of Life," Stephen Cooper's new biography, I opened it with real eagerness, hoping at last for answers to the enigma of John Fante.

Next page | Combative, manipulative -- and incandescently talented