Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth-century American novel. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published. But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears . . . and Bandini forever rejects the writer's life he fought so hard to attain.

Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth-century American novel. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published. But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears . . . and Bandini forever rejects the writer's life he fought so hard to attain.

Gale Research

Ask the Dust sold only a few copies when first published, partly because its publisher, Stackpole, was involved in expensive litigation that year and could not afford to give the book a proper advertising budget. But Ask the Dust was the Fante book "around which a cult has formed," as Warga explained. And Pleasants noted that "Carey McWilliams, Charles Bukowski and [Robert] Towne think it one of the greatest novels published in America." The book's cult popularity led in 1980 to its reprinting by Black Sparrow Press, an event which finally brought it to the attention of a much larger audience. Fante was happy with the acclaim his book belatedly received. "What pleases me most," he told Warga, "is to be hearing from so many people and to know the damn thing has stood up to the test of time."

John Fante began writing in 1929 and published his first short story in 1932. His first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, was published in 1938 and was the first of his Arturo Bandini series of novels, which also include The Road to Los Angeles and Ask the Dust. A prolific screenwriter, he was stricken with diabetes in 1955. Complications from the disease brought about his blindness in 1978 and, within two years, the amputation of both legs. He continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce, and published Dreams from Bunker Hill, the final installment of the Arturo Bandini series, in 1982. He died on May 8, 1983, at the age of seventy-four.