Nobody mentions John Fante. Thirty dollars may seem steep for a biography of an author many readers have never heard of. Cooper does more than a little to aid an ongoing resurrection of Fante, who died in 1983 at age 74. Since 1980, it has sold more than 100,000 copies but remains ignored by critics. Most have been re-issued by Black Sparrow.
None is a household title.
Neither is Fante, who focused on the Italian-American immigrant experience in Colorado and Southern California decades before Mario Puzo cast stereotypes in concrete. Cooper traces Fante's family from Abruzzi in Italy to northwest Denver, where the Fantes went to Our Lady of Mount Carmel church at West 36th Avenue and Navajo Street before moving to Boulder in 1915. But he drank and gambled much of his pay away. Fante's love-hate relationship with his father, who often beat his mother, informs much of his later work. When the Depression hit, a broke Fante Jr., fresh out of Regis College, hitchhiked to San Pedro, L.A.'s brawling port, and got a job in a fish cannery.