Los Angeles

No city occupies as many paradoxical positions in the popular imagination as Los Angeles. It is the new frontier and the end of the trail; it is American Eden and Babylon by the Pacific; it is by turns celebrated and condemned for its diversity; it is the city of perpetual renewal and the city of imminent apocalypse. This collection reveals LA in all its contradictions by documenting a literary tradition as kaleidoscopic and cacophonous as the city itself. The writings explored by Los Angeles: A Literary History record how a dusty cow town morphed into a global metropolis within a matter of decades, and how this unprecedented transformation came to define the experience of modernity. Los Angeles's literature has long gone underappreciated, the city's culture dismissed as flat and frivolous: this volume upturns that narrative, reshaping American literary history by resituating LA as its beating heart.

Author: Michael Docherty
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 07/02/2026
Pages: 440
Weight: 1.67lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.13d
ISBN: 9781009745710