"In the first comprehensive biography of John Fante, one of the great outsider figures of twentieth-century literature, Stephen Cooper untangles the enigma of an authentic American original. By turns savage and poetic, violent and full of love, such underground novels as The Road to Los Angeles, Ask the Dust and Wait Until Spring, Bandini simultaneously reveal and disguise their author.

Exacting in his scholarship, Cooper artfully traces the resemblance between author and Arturo, the hero of Fante's famed autobiographical works."--BOOK JACKET.