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What Price Hollywood? Modern American Writers and the Movies

Mark Eaton

Edmund Wilson once declared that prose fiction was influenced by Hollywood in one of two ways: first, “there are the serious novelists who do not write for the films but are influenced by them in their novels”; and second, there are “actual writers for the pictures like Mr. West and Mr. Cain who produce sour novels about Hollywood” (Wilson 1950: 49). Whether or not they worked for the studios, in other words, writers were inevitably influenced by what rather quickly emerged in the early twentieth century as America’s dominant entertainment form. For Wilson, Hollywood’s influence on American prose fiction was mostly negative, and all too many writers had succumbed to the temptation of screenwriting contracts. Even sour novels about Hollywood offered little consolation to Wilson, who believed that writers must not compromise their artistic integrity by working in the studios. “Why don’t you get out of that ghastly place?” Wilson urged Nathanael West. “You’re an artist and really have no business there” (Martin 1970: 338).

But business is precisely what West did have there, because his novels failed to earn enough money to live on. His first three novels made him less than $800 combined, and even his greatest last novel The Day of the Locust (1939) sold fewer than 1,500 copies the first year and brought him a paltry $300 in royalties (Martin 1970: 341). “Outlook is pretty hopeless” read a terse telegram about sales of The Day of the Locust from his editor at Random House, Bennett Cerf. In contrast, when Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth-Century Fox bought the film rights to Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) for $4,000, it must have been readily apparent to West that Hollywood was his best option under the circumstances, given what he viewed as a decline in the demand for serious fiction. “Why make the continuous sacrifice necessary to produce novels for a non-existent market?” West inquired of Malcolm Cowley (Martin 1970: 335). With the rise of movies and other forms of mass entertainment, the prestige value attached to high culture – what John Guillory (1993) has called its cultural capital – was apparently on the decline. “Thank God for the movies,” West himself said. “I once tried to work seriously at my craft but was absolutely unable to make even the beginning of a living. … So it wasn’t a matter of making a sacrifice, … but just a clear cut impossibility” (Hamilton 1990: 165). Far from “selling out” to the market, then, West went to Hollywood simply to make his living as a writer.

Edmund Wilson was unmoved by such financial considerations and continued to feel the same about Hollywood. When F. Scott Fitzgerald and West died one day apart in 1940, Wilson again bemoaned the fact that they had squandered their “natural gifts” by writing for hire under the studio system: “their failure to get the best out of their best years may certainly be laid partly to Hollywood, with its already appalling record of talent depraved and wasted” (Wilson 1950: 56). The record was so appalling, in fact, that Wilson dubbed it the “Hollywood Dance of Death” (Chipman 1999: 206). This may be rhetorical hyperbole, yet Wilson expresses the consensus about Hollywood among the literati of his time: that it ruined a lot of talented American writers. When Harold Ross of The New Yorker chastised another novelist-turned-screenwriter, Nunally Johnson, for “sucking around the diamond merchants of Hollywood,” he too was expressing the typical view of the New York intellectuals. Fitzgerald similarly told Johnson: “Listen, Nunally, get out of Hollywood. It will ruin you. You have a talent – you’ll kill it there” (Hamilton 1990: 188–9). Wedded as they were to the ideology that art is incompatible with commerce, even those writers who acknowledged the economic necessity of writing for the studios frequently adopted the view that film art was an oxymoron: “this is no art,” Fitzgerald declared elsewhere, “this is an industry” (Phillips 2000: xviii). Since Hollywood was utterly inimical to art, according to the prevailing view, writers must resist the temptation of studio contracts at all costs.

Yet many writers were willing to make the Faustian bargain of fettering themselves to the studio system. “If I do sell my soul to the cinema,” novelist Robert Sherwood assured his mother, “it will be for a tidy sum” (R. Fine 1993: 100). Those who sold out often justified their decision in explicitly economic terms, as when Ben Hecht acerbically remarked that “art was a synonym for bankruptcy,” or when Sidney Howard, another playwright turned screenwriter who would become the first person to win both a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award, insisted that “so long as writers earn their living by writing they are economic nitwits not to earn at least some of it where the pay is both high and certain” (R. Fine 1993: 67, 155). James M. Cain spelled out the economic realities in similarly candid if self-pitying terms in a letter to Edmund Wilson:

A writer is human, and that $1000 a week, or $1,750, or $2,500, or whatever it is, has its effect. … after being paid such sums his own work no longer excites him. With luck, his novel may pay him $10,000, $25,000 if it sells to the pictures. But it will take him six months, perhaps a year, to write, and what are such buttons to a shot who could make $50,000 in the same space of time, working for pictures? His own work ceases to seem real.

(R. Fine 1992: 42)

This letter captures the cynicism with which many writers implied that they might as well take the money and run. Adopting a similarly defensive tone, Cain wrote in the New Yorker: “I work a few weeks a year [in California], and collect the main part of my living expenses, which leaves me free to do my other work without having to worry about the rent. I don’t go nuts” (R. Fine 1993: 156). This from a man who once declared about Hollywood, with the absolutism of youth: “Imagination is free or it is not free. And here it is not free” (Minter 2002: 220). Once resigned to the division of labor between fiction and screenwriting that kept him both solvent and sane, Cain became much less adamant about any fundamental distinction between art and commerce. Although it was pretty clear that screenwriting was “not art, but … money,” Cain later admitted, “the older I get the more I wonder whether the two are not the same thing” (McCann 2000: 22).

The temptation of writing for the film studios proved to be irresistible for many writers; indeed, nearly every major American writer of the modern period either sold work to the studios or actually worked in them. Even a partial listing of those who wrote for the studios includes not only Cain, Fitzgerald, and West, but also Maxwell Anderson, Stephen Vincent Benet, Raymond Chandler, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett, Horace McCoy, Frank O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Robert Sherwood, and Thornton Wilder, as well as British writers like Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Evelyn Waugh. The fact that so many prominent writers migrated to Hollywood was certainly obvious to many observers at the time. In 1932, Fortune magazine claimed, “more members of the literati work under [Irving] Thalberg [at MGM] than it took to produce the King James Bible” (R. Fine 1992: 40). If Hollywood was the mecca of the movies, as French critic Blaise Cendrars described it in 1945, then many writers made the pilgrimage to pay their respects – and to get paid in the process.

Hollywood had a voracious appetite for source material, purchasing film rights to novels almost as soon as they were written and frequently extending invitations to the authors as well. Budd Schulberg recounts that his first job in Hollywood working for producer David Selznick was to read at least one novel a day and write a 20-page synopsis (R. Fine 1993: 110). In the wake of Lew Wallace’s $50,000 judgment against Kalem Studios for filming Ben Hur without his permission, the studios stopped ripping off writers and started courting them (R. Fine 1993: 46). In 1919, Samuel Goldwyn created Eminent Authors, Inc. to ensure that “all Goldwyn pictures are built upon a strong foundation of intelligence and refinement.” In a series of full-page advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post, he boasted that his movies would “now rank with the drama and the novel in importance” (R. Fine 1993: 49). If Goldwyn was clearly trying to elevate the cultural capital of moving pictures, the writers for their part proved willing to help. Eminent authors were promised a “$10,000 advance against one third of the film’s earnings,” an amount that reflects Goldwyn’s “surprising confidence in the usefulness of literary talent” (Hamilton 1990: 18). Yet Goldwyn apparently found writers not so useful, after all. Explaining his reasons for disbanding Eminent Authors not long after it was launched, Goldwyn declared:

The great trouble with the usual author is that he approaches the camera with some fixed literary ideal and he cannot compromise with the motion-picture viewpoint. He does not realize that a page of Henry James prose, leading through the finest shades of human consciousness, is absolutely lost on the screen.

(R. Fine 1993: 52)

Goldwyn puts his finger on some very real differences between prose fiction and film scripts, which writers ignored at their peril. They are, after all, fundamentally different kinds of writing intended for two different media – the page and the screen, respectively.

Considering the extraordinary pull exerted by Hollywood on writers throughout the early twentieth century, we still need to develop a fuller account of what exactly its influence on modern fiction entailed. Certainly some writers chafed at the financial necessity of screenwriting, which they regarded as siphoning off their energies from the literary fiction they wanted to write. William Faulkner, for instance, viewed screenwriting chiefly as a second source of income, an alternative to the short story market when he needed money. “The way I see it,” Faulkner quipped, “it’s like chopping cotton or picking potato bugs off plants; you know damn well it’s not painting the Sistine Chapel or winning the Kentucky Derby. But a man likes the feel of some money in his pocket” (R. Fine 1993: 155–6). Faulkner’s career in Hollywood amounted to brief screenwriting stints so that he could devote his energies to his novels. After returning to Oxford, Mississippi from his first trip to Hollywood in 1933, he was relieved to discover that he still knew how to write: “I have turned out three short stories since I quit the movies, so I have not forgotten how to write during my sojourn downriver.” However facetious his comparison of the studio system to a slave plantation may be, it offers a hint of the sense of constraint he felt in Hollywood. The key was to “go there and resist the money without becoming a slave to it,” and after a similar sojourn downriver a decade later, he wrote: “It took me about a week to get Hollywood out of my lungs, but I am still writing all right, I believe.” Although he found it “difficult to go completely against the grain or current of a culture,” Faulkner soon discovered that “you can compromise without selling your individuality completely to it. You’ve got to compromise because it makes things easier” (R. Fine 1993: 157).

Faulkner struck a compromise with Hollywood in part because of “his own frustrated effort to find a broad audience for his books”; he never wrote a bestselling novel, even when he tried to reach a broader audience, as he did in Sanctuary (1929), which was, in his own words, “deliberately conceived to make money” (Lurie 2004: 11, 27). Like other writers, then, Faulkner went to Hollywood to make a living: “My books have never sold, are out of print: the labor (the creation of my apocryphal county) of my life, even if I have a few things yet to add to it, will never make a living for me. I don’t have enough sure judgement about trash to be able to write it with 50% success” (R. Fine 1993: 126). By the late 1930s, Faulkner found in Hollywood a fairly reliable source of income to support his other projects. Yet if he was able to segregate screenwriting from novel writing in his mind, they were never altogether distinct in practice. As John T. Matthews contends, “surely the story writing, like his later work on filmscripts, both diverts and informs his novel writing” (Matthews 1992b: 5). Faulkner’s novels belie the notion that his time in Hollywood had no discernible affect on his writing, for many of them are shot through with filmic metaphors, references, and techniques (Godden 1997, Lurie 2004).

While some writers managed to keep screenwriting largely separate from their literary endeavors, the juggling act required to keep doing several types of writing simultaneously – novels, short stories, and screenplays – made many writers feel that they were pulled in too many directions at once, resulting in what Richard Fine has called “a crisis of professional identity” among American writers at the time (R. Fine 1992: 243). That crisis was a symptom of the changing conditions for literary and other forms of writing in the 1920s and 1930s, changes which ultimately redrew the map of American writing. The writer Orion Cheney coined the term “novelist’s nystagmus” for a new disease caused by “keeping one eye on the typewriter and the other on Hollywood,” while the literary critic Richard Fine claims that the writers who went to Hollywood became what he calls “literary schizophrenics” (R. Fine 1993: 74–5, 156). Faulkner appeared to suffer from some such a condition, as for instance when he told his agent Harold Ober: “I have had about all of Hollywood I can stand. I feel bad, depressed, dreadful sense of wasting time, I imagine most of the symptoms of some kind of blow-up or collapse” (R. Fine 1993: 126).

The Coen brothers’ film Barton Fink (1991) illustrates the lure of Hollywood for East Coast writers when the film’s eponymous playwright Barton Fink, flush from the success of his most recent play, is offered a lucrative screenwriting contract by the aptly named Capital Pictures. Overcoming his ambivalence about giving up the stage and his disdain for Hollywood’s crass commercialism, Barton accepts the offer to cash in on his Broadway success, and the Coen brothers signal his fateful decision by cutting from a golden cash register in the background of a New York bar to a California beach, the “ka-ching” of the cash register overlapping with waves crashing against a rock a split second before we actually see the change of scenery. This brilliant cut serves as a kind of shorthand way of alluding to the exotic allure of “the coast” for New York writers, and Barton Fink goes on to show “the destructive force of Hollywood on serious writers who sought to make fortunes there while preserving their artistic integrity” (Matthews 1996: 51–2). Once in Hollywood, studio boss Jack Lipnick (modeled on Jack Warner of Warner Brothers) assigns Barton to a Wallace Berry wrestling picture, which was also William Faulkner’s first Hollywood assignment. In fact, Faulkner makes an appearance in Barton Fink as the washed-up alcoholic novelist Bill Mayhew – “America’s greatest living novelist,” according to Barton. Like Faulkner himself, the Coen brothers envision the writer’s relationship to the studios as a kind of indentured servitude. The funniest scene of the film captures the studio boss’s simultaneous admiration and contempt for writers when Lipnick first meets Barton Fink in his lavish office and launches into a monologue instructing the writer how to conform to the generic and plot conventions of movies. “Look at me,” he declares in mock humility. “A writer in the room and I’m telling him what the story is.” Yet Barton does need instruction in how to write to the requirements of Hollywood, and after suffering a week of agonizing writer’s block he enlists the help of Bill Mayhew’s mistress Audrey, who becomes his muse. He then descends into a sort of Dantean Inferno that echoes and literalizes Wilson’s characterization of Hollywood as the Dance of Death. After Lipnick rejects his first screenplay for being, as he puts it, “fruity,” Barton is kept on retainer by the studio but not allowed to write. As Lipnick’s obsequious assistant tells him, “Right now the contents of your head is the property of Capital Pictures.” By the end of the film, his career ruined, Barton sits down on the beach in a three-piece wool suit. Beside him is a box entrusted to him by Charlie Meadows, aka “Madman” Mundt, which may or may not contain Audrey’s severed head. Indeed the Coen brothers imply that the box may contain Barton’s head, for the price he has paid in coming to Hollywood is nothing less than his creative imagination.

For many American writers, Hollywood represented the last gasp and final stop of their fading careers. Fitzgerald immediately comes to mind as a writer who clung to his image as a once-great writer even as he sank into despair and dissipation. Perhaps this sense of impending doom helps explain why Hollywood inspired a great deal of vitriol among American writers. “Isn’t Hollywood a dump – in the human sense of the word?” Fitzgerald once complained. “A hideous town, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement” (Phillips 2000: xviii). In his “Note on Fitzgerald,” which he wrote for Edmund Wilson’s posthumous edition of The Crack-Up (1945), John Dos Passos agreed: “Whether we like it or not it is in that great bargain sale of five and ten cent lusts and dreams that the new bottom level of our culture is being created” (Dos Passos 1945: 343). One begins to wonder whether such disparagement was in part an affectation – the expected posture of the beleaguered American writer in Hollywood. Recent critics have exposed the disingenuousness of this posture, disclosing how modernist writers assimilated mass cultural images and motifs into their work even as they critiqued it as a debased form of culture. Andreas Huyssen, most prominently, points out that “major American writers since Henry James, such as T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, and Hemingway, Pound and Stevens, felt drawn to the constructive sensibility of modernism, which insisted on the dignity and autonomy of literature.” Yet the putative “autonomy of the modernist art work, after all, is always the result of a resistance … to the seductive lure of mass culture,” Huyssen argues further, and in this sense literary modernism “constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion” (Huyssen 1985: 167, 55, vii).

Across the so-called Great Divide, popular writers complained about being excluded by high literary figures like T. S. Eliot and the critics who championed him. Raymond Chandler, a writer who in many ways bridged the division between serious and popular fiction, lashed out at Edmund Wilson for presuming the authority to make these kinds of invidious distinctions in the first place: “The problem of what is significant literature I leave to fat bores like Edmund Wilson – a man of many distinctions” (Chandler 1995a: 1042). Chandler proposed instead that we do away with such distinctions altogether. “My argument is and has always been merely that there is no such thing as serious literature” (Chandler 1981: 159). To be sure Chandler made this comment in 1950, by which time he was more or less resigned to his fate as far as literary reputation was concerned, and moreover the hard-boiled detective tradition he was associated with had long since been elevated to the status of serious literature if not high art. Yet Chandler’s comment about Wilson’s “many distinctions” nonetheless prompts us to reconsider the divisions and separations of various forms of writing between roughly 1900 and 1950, specifically the relations between hard-boiled detective fiction, the Hollywood novel, and screenwriting itself. The thread connecting all three modes of writing, of course, is Hollywood.

What Price Hollywood?, the title of George Cukor’s popular 1933 film about the national obsession with celebrities, is a question that could well be asked of US literature during a time in which the cinema emerged as arguably the country’s dominant form of cultural entertainment. In this time of cinema, what price did American writers pay for attaching themselves to the film studios, and what did they gain in return? Or to put it a bit differently, what price did Hollywood exact from modern American fiction? By posing the question in this way, I do not wish to perpetuate the notion that writers were “selling out”; rather I want to suggest, iconoclastically, that writers ultimately gained more than they lost in Hollywood. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Hollywood was in an important sense the underwriter of serious literature. For although writers often – and understandably – disparaged the movies as an inferior art form, Hollywood fascinated even as it disgusted these writers, and its influence was by no means entirely negative. Often it served as an impetus for their fiction. The Hollywood novel and hard-boiled detective fiction, after all, were a direct result of American writers’ close affiliation with the film studios. Taking a cue from Edmund Wilson, then, we might envision Hollywood’s influence on modern American fiction as occurring in one of three ways: as a conscious or unconscious pressure on literary form; as an influence on literary content; and as a major source of income for writers through selling screen rights to novels and stories as well as through screenwriting contracts.

Hollywood has long held a central place in the US national imaginary – the image America projects to itself and to the world. Yet the various meanings that accrue to Hollywood are multivalent, even contradictory. The very term is a symbolic site where a number of myths are played out: dream factory or dream dump, paradise or dystopia, the apotheosis or nadir of American culture (Springer 2000: 3). “If there was no Hollywood,” Anita Loos once remarked, “no doubt we’d have to invent it, a place to project our fantasies and reflect our dreams, no matter how outlandish” (Loos 1984: 161). For Nathanael West, Hollywood was nothing so much as a “dream dump” (West 1962: 123). American writers have by and large tended to be highly critical of Hollywood, exposing its facile promulgation of the American Dream, satirizing its fatuousness, critiquing its industrialization of art under the factory-like studio system. In the best writing about Hollywood, however, cultural critique derives not from the perspective of a detached observer but from a decidedly more implicated one – namely that of the studio insider. As a relatively underappreciated subgenre of American fiction, the Hollywood novel contradicts Wilson’s rule of thumb “about Hollywood as a subject of fiction, that those who write about it are not authentic insiders and that those who know about it don’t write” (Wilson 1950: 49). On the contrary, Hollywood novels promised readers an unflinching expose of the dream factory, written for curmudgeons and star-struck fans alike by those who had experienced it firsthand.

Touted by Photoplay magazine where it appeared as “the first great novel written around the motion picture capital of the World – Los Angeles,” Francis William Sullivan’s The Glory Road (1916) chronicles the experiences of aspiring young actress June Magregor, who comes to Hollywood to work for the Graphic Film Company, falls in love with the handsome movie star Paul Temple, fends off the sexual advances of powerful studio boss Stephen Holt, and devotes herself to the ambitious young director Tom Briscoe. Which is to say that Sullivan’s novel already features many of the recurrent character types, settings, and themes that would come to dominate the genre, such as the avaricious producer, the vulnerable female star, the ambitious director, the disillusioned writer, the down-and-out extra, the Hollywood party, the studio back lot, and the movie premiere. The Glory Road also sounds the note of critique that became a defining feature of Hollywood fictions after it, as the publicity blurb in Photoplay attests: “Its chapters exude the living atmosphere of the studios, reflect their romantic glamour – and reveal at times the brassiness of the glitter.” Even as the blurb appeals to a growing public fascination with the dream factory, it also purports to burrow down “beneath the colorful, gay surface” to reveal that, in fact, “there were dark and hidden things” underneath (Springer 2000: 12–13, 18).

Samuel Merwin’s Hattie of Hollywood (1922) similarly warns of the supposed dangers for young women lured to Hollywood by promises of stardom. No sooner does naive young Hattie agree to a screen test for the suave European director Armand de Brissac than he proceeds to give her an unsentimental education in the nefarious ways of Hollywood:

“Now, my dear,” he said, taking her hand and playing with her soft little fingers as he spoke, “you and I had better understand each other right at the start. If you’ll do exactly as I say – place yourself unquestioningly in my hands – I will make you. If you won’t, I can’t help you.”

(Springer 2000: 112)

Hattie’s education continues at the hands of a more sympathetic writer named Julian Dempster, a “highbrow” literary type who likes to think of Hattie in poetic terms as “a fragrant wild rose here in this big hothouse called Hollywood.” Hattie’s initiation is not complete until she becomes a full-fledged movie star named Harriet John. Like The Glory Road before it, Hattie of Hollywood delves into the sordid realities “of mystery, of whispered romance and scandal, of (recent) murders and underworld conspiracies” beneath its glamorous surface (Springer 2000: 113–14).

Both these early Hollywood novels establish the clichés of what John Springer has called star fictions, which typically fall into one of two groups: novels in which the heroine experiences sudden fame and then disillusionment only to achieve happiness in the end; and novels in which the heroine either fails miserably or simply throws away her success. Adele Rogers St. Johns’ The Skyrocket (1925), Anne Gardner’s Reputation (1929), Jack Preston’s Screen Star (1932), and Maysie Greig’s Romance for Sale (1934) belong to the first group, in which the heroine is saved from the perils of movie-star disillusionment, often by marriage and a “soft-focus happy ending” (Springer 2000: 125). Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Girl from Hollywood (1924), Frances Marion’s Minnie Flynn (1925), Keane McGrath’s Hollywood Siren (1932), Haynes Lubou’s Reckless Hollywood (1932), and Vicky Baum’s Falling Star (1934) belong to the second group, in which the heroines are portrayed as “tragic figures” or “sacrificial lambs” who fall prey to sexual predators and compromise themselves for the sake of stardom, or succumb to dissipation of one sort or another, only to lose everything in the end (Springer 2000: 125–6).

Written by the author of Tarzan of the Apes (1914), The Girl from Hollywood reads like a morality tale played out in the jungles of Hollywood. Gaza de Lure hails from “a little town in the Middle West” and, “burning with lofty ambition,” she arrives in Hollywood eager for fame (Burroughs 1924: 43). She gets derailed from the path to stardom by a series of unfortunate events: one unscrupulous director offers a leading role to someone else after Gaza snubs his sexual advances by saying “she would rather have caressed a rattlesnake as willingly as she would have permitted a married man to make love to her” (pp. 48–9). It turns out that sexual predators are not the only danger lurking in Hollywood. Another director introduces her to drugs, and before long she finds herself addicted to morphine and destitute (pp. 50–3). The Girl from Hollywood offers a glimpse of the dark underside of Hollywood success stories, even if it does so in obviously moralistic terms. “The story of success is always the same,” wrote Adele Rogers St. Johns in Photoplay magazine. “But the story of every failure is different. … What becomes of the rest of the ten thousand?” (Springer 2000: 142). Novels about star-crossed heroines offered one answer to that question, and it must be said that these parables may well reflect real-life tales of heartbreak and tragedy, for instance that of Peg Entwistle, an actress who committed suicide in 1932 by jumping off the Hollywood sign (Springer 2000: 133).

The epitome of this doom-and-gloom school of Hollywood fiction is Rupert Hughes’s Souls for Sale (1922), with its prudish protagonist Reverend Dr Steddon, for whom Hollywood is a “new Babylon,” “the corrupter of our young men and women – the school of crime” (Hughes 1922: 1). For Dr Steddon’s daughter Mem, however, Hollywood represents not hell but “the Eden of the movies,” and she ventures out West to become its Eve (Hughes 1922: 65). After apparently eating from the orange groves of knowledge, Mem is astonished to discover that her beauty is a valuable commodity, “for which the grateful public would pay with gratitude and fame and much money.” She soon finds that she “could take care of herself better than men had ever taken care of her” (pp. 185, 379). If Souls for Sale sets out to provide a prurient inside look at Hollywood debauchery – as if looking over the shoulder of Dr Steddon as he “gazed aghast at the appalling posters with their revolting blazon of the new word ‘Sex’ ” (p. 5) – the novel ends up heralding the age of the New Woman. Souls for Sale was so successful that Samuel Goldwyn asked Hughes to adapt his novel for the screen and even allowed him to direct the film version.

The most important early novel about the dream factory for sheer narrative ingenuity is Harry Leon Wilson’s Merton of the Movies (1922). A former editor of the journal Punch and a frequent contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, where Merton was first serialized, Wilson spent only a few months in Hollywood, but from his brief stay he wrote one of the funniest, if not the most plausible, novels about the place (D. Fine 2000: 64–5). Merton of the Movies opens with a narrative sleight of hand: for five pages we read about how the beautiful Estelle St. Clair has been abducted by the villain Snake le Vasquez. Just as she is about to be rescued by Buck Benson, a “strong, silent” type of the American West, this rapturous dime-Western narrative is suddenly interrupted by the voice of Amos Gashwiler, who admonishes his employee Merton Gill for holding a mannequin of Snake le Vasquez over his head while enacting the adventure we have just read: “Have you gone plumb crazy, or what? Put that thing down!” (Wilson 1922: 1–5). After this rude interruption of “the vivid tale” going on inside Merton’s head, we return not to the mundane reality of the store in Simsbury, Illinois, but to another daydream: Merton’s fantasy of becoming the dashing Clifford Armytage, once a “humble clerk” in the “so-called emporium of Amos G. Gashwiler,” now a “sterling star” of the silver screen (p. 6). The passage introduces us to Merton’s most persistent fantasy of all: his dream of becoming a movie star.

Merton’s penchant for fantasy ironically becomes an asset as well as a liability. Inside the gates of the fictional Holden Studios, Merton realizes that the “fragile contrivances of button-lath and thin plaster” that make up the sets are part of what he calls the “real falseness” of movie magic (Wilson 1922: 74). What he once thought of as “the fine and beautiful art of moving pictures” now appears to him a “thing of shame, of machinery, of subterfuge” (pp. 20, 166). He discovers furthermore that his childhood idol Beulah Baxter, “the slim little girl with a wistful smile” (p. 32), is married (for the third time) to her director Sig Rosenblatt, which brings about “the swift and utter destruction of his loftiest ideal” (p. 175). But Merton’s idealism is then restored by well-known actress Sarah Montague – “the Montague girl” (p. 330) – who takes pity on him and introduces him to Jeff Baird, a Mack Sennett-like director of so-called “Buckeye Comedies” designed to appeal to “the coarser element among screen patrons” (p. 90). By assuring him that they are serious dramatic films, Sarah and Jeff trick Merton into appearing in them, and Merton, like Truman in The Truman Show, becomes the butt of an elaborate joke. Needless to say, the films themselves are a hit, and Merton’s fortunes take a dramatic turn when he marries Sarah Montague at the end. Concluding “with a magazine article that focuses on his domestic life,” the novel evinces ambivalence about celebrity and cinema, which mirrors Merton’s confused attitude shifts (Rhodes 1998: 129). One reviewer worried that “there are millions who might read this story and see nothing in it to laugh at” (Springer 2000: 77). Yet the story clearly made audiences laugh in numerous stage and movie incarnations, first as a hit on Broadway in 1922, as a silent film in 1924, then as sound films in 1932 (Paramount) and again in 1947 (MGM). Surprisingly, Gertrude Stein considered it “the best book about twentieth-century American youth that has yet been done” and asked for an introduction to Wilson on a visit to California (Rhodes 1998: 123).

Another novel admired by the highbrows that has only recently received the critical attention it deserves is Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), written in the form of a diary by the hilariously brash and unself-conscious narrator, Lorelei Lee, who negotiates an upwardly mobile path from small-town debutante to society lady to authoress to movie star. William Faulkner for one, who met Loos through Sherwood Anderson, admired Lorelei’s witty companion Dorothy. “Please accept my envious congratulations on Dorothy,” he wrote, adding, “I wish I had thought of Dorothy first.” Edith Wharton told a close friend in January 1926, “I was just reading the Great American novel (at last!) ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,’ & I want to know if there are – or will be – others, & if you know the funny woman, who must be a genius” (Matthews 1992a: 207–8). And when philosopher George Santayana was asked, “what was the best book of philosophy written by an American?” he answered drolly, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Loos 1925/1927/1998: xli). These positive responses, albeit with mixed envy and condescension, suggest less stable boundaries between high and popular literature than are generally assumed. How else can we account for Wharton’s obviously tongue-in-cheek but still quite startling tribute in calling Gentlemen Prefer Blondes the Great American novel at last?

Whereas many novelists felt the pull of planet Hollywood, Loos gravitated towards the literary establishment, turning an already successful screenwriting career into an unlikely second act as a bestselling novelist: “She proved to be one of the few writers in the world who moved successfully from a career in script writing to other mediums” (Acker 1991: 178). Loos expertly negotiated her place in the literary field, facilitated by newly forged connections between the fiction market and the Hollywood studios. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes mediates the issues of gender, authorship, and cultural value that Loos was facing herself. Lorelei muses at one point, “It would be strange if I turn out to be an authoress. I mean the only career I would like to be besides an authoress is a cinema star and I was doing quite well in the cinema when Mr. Eisman made me give it all up” (Loos 1925/1998: 4, 6). Lorelei Lee’s success in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, moreover, is not unlike the success of the novel itself, as Loos inadvertently suggests when she later conflated the protagonist with the actual novel in her autobiography: “From the beginning, my tough little blonde proved to be a healthy financial enterprise” (Loos 1974: 12). When Blondes first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, newsstand sales nearly tripled; the novel then sold out the first printing overnight and went through 19 printings within three years, making Loos a millionaire by the end of the decade (Loos 1925/1927/1998: xli, Matthews 1992a: 207).

The extraordinary success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes can be attributed, in part, to fluctuating valuations of cultural capital within the literary field as a whole. Loos brings her considerable satirical gifts to bear on those very fluctuations in a sequel to Blondes, cleverly titled But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1927). In the sequel, Lorelei undertakes a program of cultural refinement by subscribing to the Book of the Month Club, which as she puts it, “tells you the book you have to read every month to make your individuality stand out” (Loos 1927/1998: 135). Joan Shelley Rubin’s work on the Book-of-the-Month-Club’s middlebrow pedagogy helps illuminate Lorelei’s assumption that it will improve her cultural taste; the Club’s advertising in the mid-1920s promised to keep subscribers abreast of “all the important new books” so that they can “know about them and talk about them” and “become ‘cultured’ before anyone else” (Rubin 1992: 104). Going well beyond book clubs in her pursuit of cultural refinement, Lorelei seeks out the authors themselves and somehow gets herself invited to a luncheon with all the “High Brows” who meet regularly at the Algonquin Hotel: “H.L. Mencken, Theadore [sic] Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclare [sic] Lewis” (Loos 1927/1998: 138). By the end of the novel, however, Lorelei is back in Hollywood, where she finds herself “to [sic] busy going over my scenarios with Mr. Montrose, to keep up any other kind of literary work” (Loos 1927/1998: 123). The end point of her climb up the ladder of success, in other words, is not high society but Hollywood. Loos once opined that any reputable “movie writer wouldn’t have dreamed that my heroine had any place on celluloid” (Loos 1925/1998: xl). Marilyn Monroe proved her wrong, of course, and today Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is remembered primarily for Howard Hawks’s very successful 1953 musical, with a “corresponding devaluation in its literary prestige” (Hegeman 1995: 546).

The comic potential of young heroines overcoming all obstacles on their path to stardom was mined by another popular writer, Elinor Glyn, who came to Hollywood from her native Britain on a contract with Famous Players-Lasky and became, like Loos, a well-known early female screenwriter who wrote more than a dozen screenplays for the studio. Glyn’s novel It (1927) featured a modern flapper protagonist in the mold of Lorelei Lee, and together with the subsequent film adaptation starring Clara Bow, It sparked the “It Girl” craze of the late 1920s. Glyn herself defined “It” as a “strange magnetism” possessed by certain women – and men – which makes them irresistible to others. According to Joseph Roach, the term derived in part from Glyn’s frank “assessment of the liberated sex lives of actresses,” and the author, herself notorious for sexual escapades recounted in an earlier succès de scandale Three Weeks (1907), almost certainly meant the term “It” as a euphemism for sexual intercourse, more freely indulged in by young women reacting against the strictures of an earlier era (Roach 2007: 4, 21, 24–5).

J. P. McEvoy’s wise-cracking Dixie Dugan, the heroine of his comic Hollywood novels Showgirl (1928) and Hollywood Girl (1929), both of which were made into movies by Warner Brothers as Showgirl and Showgirl in Hollywood (1930), uses her sexual allure to advance her career, but without losing her self-respect. “To hell with love anyway,” Dixie Dugan exclaims. “I’m going in for a career” (McEvoy 1929: 43). Written in “hallucinatory first person” much like Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Hollywood Girl exposes the false pretenses under which men attempted to seduce a “blonde goddess” like Dixie Dugan: “my God do I have to be mauled and muzzled over by every man I go out with … [by] the bear who comes along and says hello baby how would you like to go into movies … wouldn’t you love to be a star” (McEvoy 1929: 83–8). Hollywood Girl takes the form of letters and telegrams to her friends and family back home: “I could tell you stories that would curl your hair,” she says. Dixie herself manages to beat the odds through sheer ingenuity and boundless wit, metaphorically rising from “the sub-basement next to the boilers” all the way “up to the roof garden where the stars … munch caviar and flip cigarette butts down on an adoring world.” “I’ve been tossing my share over the rail this last few weeks,” Dixie announces triumphantly, “and boy how I love it. This is la vie” (McEvoy 1929: 222–4).

Carl Van Vechten came to Hollywood on assignment from Vanity Fair in late 1926, just after Nigger Heaven (1926) was published, and he translated his experiences into a Hollywood novel titled Spider Boy (1928), about a short story writer and playwright, Ambrose Deacon, who, flush from his successful play on Broadway, is offered the chance to write Imperia Starling’s next film. “Call it an industry, call it an art,” explains her director Herbert Ringrose, sensing Deacon’s reluctance. “Why quibble? The writer is perhaps the most essential single factor – saving always the director – in Hollywood” (Van Vechten 1926: 41). The director adds that Deacon can have more cultural influence as a screenwriter: “How many people see one of your plays? A few paltry thousands every week, while millions look at my pictures” (p. 49). “Think what would happen if you wrote for the films,” she continues. “There it would be always gleaming on silver screens all over the globe” (p. 49). Seduced by this logic, Deacon signs a contract for “a sum of money which seemed fantastic” (p. 132), and Imperia puts him up in her 27-room Beverly Hills “bungalow,” where he is less a guest than a prisoner. Almost immediately Ambrose has second thoughts, and Hollywood begins to seem like a “place where playwrights were seduced to become prostitutes for the motion pictures” (p. 164).

“The linkage of studio and whorehouse,” as David Fine puts it, is also “a recurring motif” in Carroll and Garrett Graham’s darkly satirical novel Queer People (D. Fine 2000: 68). Here the protagonist Theodore Anthony “Whitey” White is, much like Van Vechten, a journalist who comes up with an elaborate ploy to masquerade as a gossip columnist for the Examiner and do an exposé on what he calls “the three Hollywood G’s – girls, gin, and gynecology” (Graham and Graham 1930/1976: 225). To get in on “the real money,” however, he decides to become a writer. “You don’t have to be good,” one veteran screenwriter tells him. “It doesn’t make any difference what you do, the director will hash it up anyway” (p. 149). Neither talent nor experience is required, but this doesn’t prevent some writers from harboring rather lofty goals about their work. Take Rethea Clore, for instance, a recently hired writer with only one novel to her credit. “Although she had never attempted motion pictures before,” Whitey muses, “she was about to demonstrate her all embracing genius by making The Tigress the most artistically and commercially successful film production in history” (pp. 93–4). Another writer sets out to write “the great American novel,” only to wind up “rehashing the worst American gags” for inane comedies (p. 46). Screenwriting is “no profession for a grown man,” one established Hollywood insider tells Whitey, adding, “But, what the hell! There’s money in it” (p. 146).

John Dos Passos also compared his predicament as a writer in Hollywood to a form of prostitution, complaining to his publisher: “If you people sold more books you wouldn’t have me out in the red-light district like this” (Dos Passos 1973: 442). The author projected an image of being above Hollywood even as he took advantage of the opportunity to earn a studio paycheck. Thus when Paramount hired him in the summer of 1934, he wrote his friend Ernest Hemingway, “I’ve just signed up to serve a term of five weeks in Hollywood. I was in a sort of a gap in my work and thought I might as well take a stab at it, restoring my finances and taking a look at the world’s great bullshit center” (Dos Passos 1973: 437). His tone is as self-pitying as it is pungent, yet I believe there was an ulterior motive for Dos Passos to get “a short glimpse of Hollywood” (p. 442), for he had not yet finished The Big Money (1936), the final volume of his USA trilogy (1930–6). Michael Denning provocatively calls The Big Money Dos Passos’s Hollywood novel, one so good it takes “its place next to the Hollywood dystopias written by the studio radicals like Nathanael West and Horace McCoy” (Denning 1997: 191). This categorization is supported by the title itself, as Dos Passos often referred to Hollywood by that phrase. “Having been for a few weeks in the big money makes us feel strangely broke,” he related to one friend with bitter irony. “I don’t think the big money is what it’s cracked up to be” (Dos Passos 1973: 444).

Dos Passos’s experience in Hollywood was finally an unhappy one – for one thing, he contracted rheumatic fever shortly after arriving in California; for another, he learned that a younger writer was “ghosting” the screenplay he was working on (Dos Passos 1973: 443). He often bemoaned the formulaic nature of movies and worried that serious fiction was threatened by a lack of public interest and professional viability. All the rewards went to hack writers like Fitzgerald’s fictional Pat Hobby who churned out pulp fiction for magazines. Dos Passos was convinced he must leave Hollywood to preserve his integrity. “I’ve said goodbye to Paramount,” he told Malcolm Cowley, “so I feel very much better. … It’s like endorsing absorbine junior or Beauty mattresses” (Dos Passos 1973: 445). Yet as Dos Passos once confessed to Fitzgerald, “Hollywood has been enormously instructive” (Dos Passos 1973: 446). Hollywood taught him, among other things, that there is finally no necessary distinction between the aesthetic and the commercial. It obviously had other salutary benefits as well: not only did Dos Passos manage to complete his massive three-volume trilogy on the first three decades of the American century; he also found himself uniquely positioned to take stock of the present and future state of the novel. When pressed to say what serious literary fiction could still accomplish in the time of cinema, Dos Passos seized upon a startling analogy: “[The novel] is the best possible moving picture machine contrived to focus the present moment on the screen of the future” (Foster 1986: 190).

Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) and I Should Have Stayed Home (1938) both deal with, in Edmund Wilson’s words, “the miserable situation of movie-struck young men and women who starve and degrade themselves in Hollywood” (Wilson 1950: 20). Like James M. Cain, McCoy was a contributor to Black Mask as well as a journalist. He arrived in Hollywood in 1931 hoping to become a movie star, not a writer, but in 1932, he took a job as a junior writer at Columbia for $50 per week. For the next 20 years he worked steadily in Hollywood, and his earnings rose to $1,000 per week by 1950 (Haut 2002: 54). During that time McCoy wrote five novels and nearly 100 screenplays (D. Fine 2000: 101). Hollywood was his primary employer and a precondition for the novels, as “McCoy borrowed heavily from his own Hollywood experiences” in his fiction (Springer 2000: 153). In They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Gloria Bailey comes from Dallas desperate for movie stardom, having read about Hollywood in fan magazines back home while in the hospital for an earlier suicide attempt. Robert Syverten wants to become, as he says immodestly, “the greatest director in the world” (McCoy 1935/1997: 20). Although he has not yet made a single picture, Robert offers her this unsolicited advice, “Why don’t you quit the movies?” She replies, “Why should I? I may get to be a star overnight” (p. 23). Gloria enters a dance marathon contest in hopes that a producer or director might discover her and then give her “a start in a picture” (p. 24). Nothing of the sort happens, of course, and afterwards a despondent Gloria enjoins Robert to, as she puts it, “pinch-hit for God” by killing her (p. 127). Now indicted for murdering his dance partner, Robert Syverten retrospectively narrates in typical hard-boiled style. He tries to exonerate himself by claiming it was assisted suicide, not murder. Simon & Schuster marketed They Shoot Horses as a hard-boiled novel like Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which came out earlier that year (Haut 2002: 47). The two novels share a “confessional, flashback narrative” point of view, which “has the effect of implicating the reader as confidant and arousing some sympathy for the doomed men” (D. Fine 2000: 102). Whereas Cain does not reveal the outcome until the end, McCoy uses the murder trial as a narrative frame. The novel opens with the judge’s words, printed alone on the page, “THE PRISONER WILL STAND” and ends with the judge’s final words, “MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL” (McCoy 1935/1997: 212).

McCoy wrote a more self-conscious Hollywood novel in I Should Have Stayed Home, which examines “the desperation of dream seekers who are chewed up and disgorged by the system,” focusing on two movie extras, Mona Matthews and Ralph Carston (D. Fine 2000: 74). Near the beginning of the novel, the two characters pass a billboard that reads “ALL ROADS LEAD TO HOLLYWOOD,” and there could hardly be a more fitting motto for the Hollywood novel as a genre (McCoy 1938/1996: 8). For Mona and Ralph the road leads not to “the Hollywood you read about,” however, but to “a cheap town filled with cheap stores and cheap people” (p. 5). McCoy’s novel measures the distance between a mythical Hollywood, “where today you are broke and unknown and tomorrow you are rich and famous,” and the real Hollywood of disappointed actors like Ralph, who ends up “hating the place and all the celebrities in it (only because they were celebrities, something I was not)” (p. 6). “I should have stayed home,” Ralph says bitterly at the end, voicing the phrase that gives the novel its title (p. 184). Perhaps because she is less resentful about not being a star herself, Mona is incisive in her critique of the discourse of celebrity, singling out fan magazines in particular for propagating “goddamn lies” about stars who “started at the bottom and rose to fame and fortune – what do you think that does for all the millions of other girls in this country – the millions of waitresses and small-town girls?” (pp. 44–5). “I’ll tell you what it does,” Mona declares emphatically, “It makes them discontented” (p. 45).

McCoy recognized that aspiring actors – with all their hopes and heartaches – were compelling subjects for literary fiction. One character in I Should Have Stayed Home even quits his job in the publicity department at Universal “to write a novel about extras in the movies. How they live, what they think – you know, there’s a big field there” (McCoy 1938/1996: 73). Like the actual writers of Hollywood fictions, Johnny Hill plans to include “the tragedy and heart-break” of not making it in the film industry, as well as “the viciousness and cruelty” within it (p. 74). “That side of Hollywood’s never been told,” Hill claims. “All you ever read about Hollywood is the waitress who gets a test and turns out to be a big shot” (p. 74). American writers have “missed a good net,” he says, by not writing about the nearly “twenty thousand extras” in Hollywood (p. 74).

That story was being told in a number of increasingly gloomy Hollywood novels in the late 1930s, and of course the most bitingly satirical Hollywood novel of all is Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), which according to none other than Edmund Wilson is “mostly occupied with extras and gives mere glimpses into the upper reaches” (Wilson 1950: 48). “Like McCoy’s characters,” David Minter points out, “West’s come from the margins of Hollywood” (p. 238). These two writers also share the fact that they were “initially conspicuous failures in the mass market of American book publishing” (Springer 2000: 152). McCoy’s only successful work was his later novel Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948), which sold 1.6 million copies in paperback. By this point in his career, McCoy had capitulated to his publisher’s desire to position him as a hard-boiled writer and thus tap into the pulp fiction market: a James Avanti cover illustration for Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye “depicts a cigarette-smoking man sitting on a bed, watching a semi-clad woman, who, with her back to him, assumes a provocative pose” (Haut 2002: 53). The blurb reads: “Love as hot as a blow-torch. Crime as vicious as the jungle” (p. 53).

As a Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust has more in common with John O’Hara’s Hope of Heaven (1938), published one year before, than with Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941), published two years later. For while Fitzgerald’s last novel deals with a fictional studio boss named Monroe Stahr, O’Hara’s novel, like West’s, delves into what Edmund Wilson once called “the nondescript fringes of Hollywood” (Wilson 1950: 23). While working as a movie critic at the New York Morning Telegraph and as a publicist for Warner Brothers and RKO in New York, O’Hara harbored a “dream of going to Hollywood and making large sums there, but I don’t suppose that will ever come true” (R. Fine 1993: 100). His dream did come true in 1934, when Paramount optioned his first novel Appointment in Samara and offered him a contract for ten weeks” (R. Fine 1993: 100). Edmund Wilson lambasted Hope of Heaven, charging that O’Hara “showed serious signs of suffering from Hollywood lightheadedness,” even if he had not lost his “capacity for judgment” altogether (Wilson 1950: 24, 26). In contrast, Wilson was lavish with his praise of West for keeping his wits about him: “West has footed a precarious way and has not slipped at any point into relying on the Hollywood values in describing the Hollywood people” (p. 53). Anyone who has ever been to Hollywood, Wilson claims, “knows how the mere aspect of things is likely to paralyze the aesthetic faculty by providing no point d’appui from which to exercise its discrimination, if it does not actually stun the sensory apparatus itself” (p. 53). All the more remarkable, then, that West managed like some entomologist to have “stalked and caught some fine specimens of these Hollywood Lepidoptera and impaled them on fastidious pins” (p. 53).

Most prominent among West’s specimens is the narrator Tod Hackett, a once promising painter who has taken a job as a set designer in Hollywood, “despite the arguments of his friends who were certain that he was selling out and would never paint again” (West 1962: 60–1). These so-called friends echo the reproach West received when he first went to Hollywood, and thus Hackett is a figure for the American novelist and in danger of becoming, as befits his name, a hack. Instead of writing an apologia for his involvement in a commercial medium, however, West subtly undermines the myth of selling out in Hollywood – the notion that writing for the movies “constitutes a deep betrayal of a writer’s talents” (Dardis 1984: 167). Tod proves the prediction that he would never paint again premature, for instance, by completing his greatest artwork by the end of the novel, a painting titled The Burning of Los Angeles. Hollywood in fact acts as a spur to art, for “the strangeness of all he sees rekindles his desire to paint” (Dickstein 2002: 24). Only by coming to Los Angeles does Tod Hackett realize his full potential as an artist: “He had been in Hollywood less than three months and still found it a very exciting place,” and “ ‘The Burning of Los Angeles,’ a picture he was soon to paint, definitely proved he had talent” (West 1962: 59–60). Hackett applies a lesson West had learned all too well: only by making it the subject matter of his fiction could Hollywood serve to spur rather than hinder his artistic efforts.

West’s other lepidoptera include the “successful screen writer” Claude Estee, the morose automaton Homer Simpson (who later lends his name to Matt Groening’s cartoon hero of The Simpsons), as well as the aspiring actress Faye Greener, who seems poised for movie stardom: she is not only “extremely beautiful” but “taut and vibrant” and “shiny as a new spoon” (West 1962: 94). Faye is “an affected actress” who is theatrical to the point of self-parody (p. 94). Tod admits, “Faye’s affectations were so completely artificial that he found them charming” (p. 103). Nearly every male character promptly falls in love with her, and although she “enjoyed being stared at,” she keeps all of them at a distance because they had “nothing to offer her” (pp. 67, 94). Faye has just appeared as “one of the dancing girls” in a B movie, and Tod “had gone all the way to Glendale to see her in that movie” (p. 67). Her screen persona is at once inviting and distancing: in one publicity still she “lay stretched out on the divan with her arms and legs spread, as though welcoming a lover” (p. 68). While Faye “reduces Homer to masochistic submission,” she inspires in Tod an impulse to violence (Springer 2000: 163). “Her invitation wasn’t to pleasure,” the latter observes, “but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love” (West 1962: 68). Although Tod manages to laugh at his self-conscious parody of hard-boiled language here, there is nothing funny about the fact that West’s otherwise sympathetic narrator fantasizes about raping Faye no less than three times (West 1962: 68). In the most brutal of these rape fantasies, Tod stalks Faye into a dark parking lot and “enacts” the following rape scenario in his mind:

He knew what it would be like lurking in the dark vacant lot, waiting for her. … She would drive up, turn the motor off, look up at the stars, so that her breasts reared, then toss her head and sigh … then get out of the car. The long step she took would make her tight dress pull up so that an inch of glowing flesh would show above her black stocking. As he approached carefully, she would be pulling her dress down, smoothing it nicely over her hips.

(West 1962: 174)

Tod’s stalking fantasy appears to come straight out of a B-movie thriller, the kind West himself worked on at Republic Studios, which was nicknamed Repulsive Studios by writers. Indulging in the illicit images, clichéd language, and salacious content of so many Hollywood film noirs, the scene plays out both as a critique of sexual violence in the culture industry and as an example of it. Despite Tod’s insistence that “she wasn’t hard-boiled,” Faye Greener is precisely hard-boiled, the kind of femme fatale who would hardly be out of place in a Raymond Chandler novel: “She was supposed to look drunk and she did, but not with alcohol” (pp. 67–8). In this scene, the novel is virtually indistinguishable in its language and visual imagery from hard-boiled detective fiction.

The Day of the Locust also represents the appeal of Hollywood for those who arrived by the thousands with hopes of achieving fame and fortune, only to realize that stardom would be more difficult to attain than the fan magazines and studio propaganda had led them to believe. According to Blaise Cendrars, “the human tide of interest and enthusiasm unleashed by the movies has become so threatening to Hollywood that Hollywood has had to take inhuman and lopsided defensive measures to hold back this frenzy fed by its own publicity” (Cendrars 1995: 98, 100). Whatever defensive measures Cendrars had in mind, his comments anticipate West’s wry observation in his justly celebrated movie premiere scene that the “police force would have to be doubled when the stars started to arrive” to hold back the “frenzy” of the mob (West 1962: 176). Long viewed as a centerpiece of the novel, this scene captures the discontent that seethes beneath otherwise harmless celebrity worship. “They were savage and bitter,” the narrator observes, “and had been made so by boredom and disappointment” (p. 176). Once the stars arrive, “the crowd would turn demoniac, … then nothing but machine guns would stop it” (p. 176). West envisions the riot as an eruption of pent-up disappointments and unfulfilled desires, pointing to the potential for collective protest against the adulation of stars. If the crowd spontaneously erupts into a collective protest of sorts, however, their protest is finally diffused by its own entropic energies as well as by the intervention of the police. Sitting alone in a police cruiser afterwards, Tod listens to sirens wailing outside, and he “began to imitate the siren as loud as he could” (p. 185). This crazed siren call resounds beyond the ending of The Day of the Locust, giving voice to a confused, unwitting recognition of the irrationality at the heart of the culture industry.

F. Scott Fitzgerald read The Day of the Locust while working on The Last Tycoon (1941) and felt that the novel “has scenes of extraordinary power”: “Especially I was impressed by … the character and handling of the aspirant actress and the uncanny almost medieval feeling of some of his Hollywood background, set off by those vividly drawn grotesques” (Fitzgerald 1994: 395). Although left unfinished at his death in December 1941, The Last Tycoon is Fitzgerald’s own contribution to the genre. “In this city that swarms with writers,” Edmund Wilson observed, “none yet has really mustered the gumption to lay bare the heart and bowels of the moving-picture business,” but at the time of his death, he reports, Fitzgerald “had written a considerable part of what promised to be by all odds the best novel ever devoted to Hollywood” (Wilson 1950: 48, 55). Fitzgerald wanted a narrator who was “of the movies but not in them,” and he made Cecelia Brady a studio boss’s daughter rather than a player herself: “My father was in the picture business the way another man might be in cotton and steel, and I look at it tranquilly” (Fitzgerald 1945: 138, Fitzgerald 1941/1994: 3). Twenty-year old Cecelia becomes infatuated with Monroe Stahr, “who led pictures way up past the range of theatre, reading a sort of golden age, before the censorship” (Fitzgerald 1941/1994: 28). Monroe Stahr is modeled on the maverick producer Irving Thalberg, whom Fitzgerald met in 1931 at MGM while working on a screen adaptation of Katharine Brush’s novel Redheaded Woman. Although impressed with Thalberg, Fitzgerald took umbrage at being asked to adapt a novel he regarded as derivative of his own work and suffered the further humiliation of being assigned to collaborate with another writer. Fitzgerald was fired from the film after three weeks, and Anita Loos was assigned to rewrite his script (Springer 2000: 210). Fitzgerald always thought poorly of screenwriters (besides himself). He told Maxell Perkins that Hollywood was “a strange conglomeration of a few excellent overtired men making the pictures, and as dismal a crowd of fakes and hacks at the bottom as you can imagine” (R. Fine 1993: 137).

While publicly disdaining the culture industry, Fitzgerald seemed happy enough to reap its considerable financial rewards. He used whatever means necessary to profit from his writing: by placing his stories in the highest paying commercial magazines; by selling novels and short stories to Hollywood studios; and by signing on as a screenwriter himself. Fitzgerald had much success with his novels. He sold This Side of Paradise (1920) to Famous Players for $10,000, and he later associated the success of his first novel with the movies: “the presses were pounding out This Side of Paradise like they pound out extras in the movies” (Fitzgerald 1945: 88). Warner Brothers bought his next novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) for $2,500, and in 1926 Fitzgerald sold film rights to The Great Gatsby (1925) for an astonishing sum of $45,000. The next year he accepted a $3,500 advance to write an original screenplay and arrived in Hollywood with Zelda for the first of what would turn out to be many sojourns out West (Dixon 1986: 103, Springer 2000: 208). He returned in 1937 with a six-month contract at MGM for $1,000 per week, yet he managed only one screen credit during this final period in Hollywood (for Three Comrades), and he was fired for a second time by MGM two years later, when his literary fortunes were at an all-time low, with book royalties amounting to a mere $33 (Springer 2000: 211). Fitzgerald found Esquire to be his best source of income during these meager years; he wrote a series of short stories for the magazine about a Hollywood hack named Pat Hobby, a kind of fictional alter ego: “He had once known sumptuous living, but for the past ten years jobs had been hard to hold – harder to hold than glasses” (Springer 2000: 212). At one point, Fitzgerald even began signing telegrams to his editors as “Pat Hobby Fitzgerald,” and the character clearly voices the author’s frustrations with the factory-like studio system: “what people you sat with at lunch was more important in getting along than what you dictated in your office. This was no art, as he often said – this was an industry” (Fitzgerald 1962: 22).

Most Hollywood writers understood that their treatment by the studios was not likely to improve without unionization. Raymond Chandler observes in his essay “Writers in Hollywood,” for instance, that a “salaried writer” in Hollywood has “little power or decision over the uses of his own craft,” because the studios own all the copyrights, although he sounded a more hopeful note at the end of the essay, claiming that “the writers of Hollywood are winning their battle for prestige” (Chandler 1995a: 994, 1003). He meant that some writers – Preston Sturges comes to mind – were getting hired as “producers and directors of their own screenplays” (p. 1003). Meanwhile, efforts to create a union to represent the interests of all writers were underway, yet the studios predictably resisted these unionization efforts at every turn. While the Screen Writers Guild was founded in 1933, not until 1941 did the major studios begrudgingly accept the guild, and the intervening years witnessed what one critic has called a Hollywood writers war (Springer 2000: 179).

Budd Schulberg’s novel What Makes Sammy Run (1941) chronicles the growing antagonism between writers and studios, as well as between writers themselves, such as when jokes about forming a writers guild went around the writers’ table at the studio commissary: “Some of the laughter was automatic, some frightened, some reactionary” (Schulberg 1941/1990: 164). The son of a Paramount executive, Schulberg grew up in Hollywood but elected to become a novelist rather than a screenwriter. “I had chosen to live the free life of a novelist,” he recalls, because “I resented the way writers – even the William Faulkners and Scott Fitzgeralds – were shuffled like cards in Hollywood” (Rapf 2003: xv). What Makes Sammy Run reflects this view of writers as pawns in the studio system; the narrator Al Manheim is a newspaper columnist who comes to Hollywood in hopes of becoming a screenwriter, only to find it inhospitable to writers.

In Steve Fisher’s Hollywood crime novel I Wake Up Screaming (1941), a young screenwriter who is never identified by name reflects on a fledgling career that has taken him from Broadway to Hollywood Boulevard: “I was twenty-seven, had a play on Broadway, and now a studio contract with one of the majors. … Hell, I even had my Writer’s Guild of America card!” (Fisher 1941: 3). The writer soon discovers that “desperate games were being played” behind the scenes (p. 21). At lunch one day, he notices a director sitting alone in the corner who had three weeks left on his contract “but whose option was being dropped”: “He sat there like a ghost, nibbling at salad. No one wanted any part of him. No one could afford to be seen sitting with failure” (p. 22). This is just one example of “the rotten little jealousies, the screaming egos, the petty smugness” in an industry where you are only as good as your last hit film (p. 134). A novel that skillfully combines conventions of the Hollywood novel with those of hard-boiled detective fiction, I Wake Up Screaming attests to the fact that by 1941 Los Angeles had come to be seen not only as the nation’s film capital but also as the “capital of American noir” (D. Fine 2000: x).

American hard-boiled detective fiction has most often been regarded as a popular genre, separate but equal to the mainstream US literary tradition. Segregation of literary forms is by no means as morally suspect as racial segregation, of course, but I use the term separate but equal advisedly to suggest that the classification of hard-boiled fiction, however appropriate in terms of generic considerations, was an invidious distinction under evaluative literary-critical paradigms. Because of their association with classic film noirs of the 1930s and 1940s, often directly adapted from them (as often as not by hard-boiled writers), American crime novels have always carried a taint of the popular in spite of their belated critical acceptance by scholars after the cultural turn in literary studies. The role of Hollywood as a cultural and economic force in the literary field during the 1920s and 1930s challenges this segregation of popular forms from the mainstream American literary tradition. While some writers conceived of themselves as serious literary authors, others were relegated – even against their wishes – to the restricted field of formula fiction. What these writers had in common, however, was their connection to Hollywood.

A shared connection to the film industry did nothing to prevent them from disparaging it, as if their resentment toward the invidious distinctions made in the literary field were displaced onto an undisguised disdain for the studio system. “There is no reward for aesthetic virtue here,” James M. Cain once sneered, “no punishment for aesthetic crime” (D. Fine 1999: 124). Feigning nausea, Cain complained in his 1933 essay “Camera Obscura,” what “makes a writer sick at his stomach when he walks on a movie lot” is the sense “that in some vague way he is a prostitute of the arts” (R. Fine 1993: 123). Like Faulkner, Cain advised fellow writers to compromise with Hollywood: “to have a clear idea of what his function is, and to discharge that function, instead of aspiring to functions which simply are not there” (R. Fine 1993: 155). He often boasted that he knew exactly what function he was expected to perform in Hollywood, and once he stopped writing fiction in later years, he consoled himself with the idea that, after all, “there are worse trades than confecting entertainment” (R. Fine 1993: 156). In a sort of sequel to his Hollywood career, Cain played a major role in devising a plan to establish the American Authors’ Authority, which he and other writers hoped would “revolutionize literary economics” (R. Fine 1992: 4).

Due to its initial reception as an indigenous popular genre, and no doubt owing as well to its reputation as a very masculine genre, hard-boiled detective fiction has a problematic status in the literary field. Certainly the changing fortunes of detective fiction over the years attests to the mutability of literary categories, if nothing else, yet even from the moment of its first appearance in the 1920s, the status of hard-boiled fiction was viewed as a problem. In the genre’s infancy, crime fiction writers often wrote anonymously for the pulp magazines, thus occupying a much lower position in the spectrum of cultural forms than either serious novelists or journalist critics. But as detective fiction’s status elevated after Dashiell Hammett and his hard-boiled descendants won over the critics, these writers found themselves adrift on a sea of shifting literary categories.

From the 1920s onward, Hollywood formed a link between literary and popular fiction, connecting hard-boiled writers Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and others to writers like Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, who staked their careers on the rather rarefied notion of the Great American Novel and produced a number of truly great novels in the process. Hard-boiled writers, meanwhile, suffered from an inferiority complex and often made desperate bids for literary respectability. Nearly every crime fiction writer started out in the pulp magazines that, as Sean McCann notes, “came to define a distinct subfraction of the American periodical marketplace – one at sharp ideological, aesthetic, and economic odds with both the era’s elite journals of opinion and with the much larger realm of mass-market entertainment” (McCann 2000: 48). From the beginning, hard-boiled detective fiction arguably occupied a liminal or in-between status in the literary field, with one foot in the sea of mass culture and the other tentatively testing the waters of modernism.

The underlying connections between hard-boiled detective fiction and American literary modernism are all the more apparent when we consider that the same literary agent, H. N. “Swanie” Swanson, represented F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Horace McCoy (Haut 2002: 29, 96). Moreover, many modernist writers, including T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner, were avid readers of American crime fiction (McGurl 2001: 158–9). In a kind of mutual admiration society, serious writers influenced hard-boiled fiction writers and vice versa.

When it was advantageous to look down his nose at screenwriting as a profession, Raymond Chandler could be as scathing as anyone. “Personally I think Hollywood is poison to any writer, the graveyard of talent. I have always thought so. But perhaps I have lived too close to it” (Chandler 1981: 6). Determined to make his living from writing literature, Chandler liked to think that he was not beholden to the studio system. If he could not make a living from his fiction, though, he knew he could always turn to what he called “the Hollywood slaughterhouse, ankle-deep in blood and screaming like a Saracen” (Chandler 1981: 112). Not a happy prospect. In his essay “Writers in Hollywood” (1945), he goes as far as to suggest that a writer simply cannot work in the studio system “without dulling the fine edge of his mind, without becoming little by little a conniver rather than a creator, a subtle and facile journeyman rather than a craftsman” (Chandler 1995a: 997). And finally, on a less serious note, Chandler once joked, “good original screenplays were almost as rare in Hollywood as virgins” (Chandler 1981: 70).

Such criticism betrays a slightly nervous undertone, as if Chandler could not help but worry about being further tainted by his association with Hollywood. Attuned to the nuances of prestige in a highly variegated culture industry, he already resented being relegated to the realm of popular culture even as he took credit for bolstering the status of detective fiction. “In this country,” he wrote in a 1950 letter, “the mystery writer is looked down on as sub-literary merely because he is a mystery writer, rather than for instance a writer of social significance twaddle” (Chandler 1995a: 1042). By this point in his career, of course, it proved beneficial for him to be somewhat dismissive of prestige as the only measure of what he had accomplished as a writer. “What greater prestige can a man like me … have,” he wondered, “than to have taken a cheap, slovenly, and utterly lost kind of writing and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?” Sounding rather like French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, he observes that “you cannot have art without a public taste, and you cannot have a public taste without a sense of style and quality throughout the social structure” (Chandler 1981: 48, 68). Besides, one could do little to determine one’s position in the literary field in any case: “I do not know what the loftiest level of literary achievement is; neither did Aeschylus or Shakespeare” (Chandler 1995a: 986).

Saddled in later years with the charge that he was repeating himself as a writer, Chandler decided to take on a new challenge by tackling the Hollywood novel, a genre he ungenerously claimed “interests me because it has never been licked” (Phillips 2000: 119). “No doubt I have learned a lot from Hollywood,” Chandler admitted. “Please do not think I completely despise it, because I don’t. … It is a great subject for the novel – probably the greatest still untouched. But how to do it with a level mind, that’s the thing that baffles me” (Chandler 1981: 64–5). To call Hollywood “still untouched” as a subject of fiction after the flurry of Hollywood novels between 1939 and 1941 seems more than a little disingenuous, yet Chandler’s comment here interestingly echoes Edmund Wilson’s pronouncement with which I began, to the effect that Hollywood was an untouchable subject because no writer could presume to have enough critical distance from it. Determined to succeed where his predecessors had failed, Chandler set out to write his own Hollywood novel, a project that, given his reputation as a detective fiction writer par excellence, nicely aligns the two literary genres I have been tracing in this essay.

The result was The Little Sister (1949), which describes Hollywood, “for all its surface glitter, as the dumping ground for failed dreams” (Phillips 2000: 123). At once a repository for the author’s frustrations with the film industry and recognizably hard-boiled, The Little Sister improbably features Philip Marlowe, the now famous dick whom Chandler had created more than 10 years earlier. “I used to like this town,” says the jaded Marlowe. “A long time ago. … Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful” (Chandler 1995a: 357). Marlowe’s nostalgia harks back to a time before the postwar population boom was in full swing, when Los Angeles had fewer people and less crime. The city was also a haven for a small cadre of writers. “Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America,” Marlowe tells us. “It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either” (p. 357). As intellectuals were absorbed into the culture industry, the place lost some of its luster. Marlowe concludes his little diatribe against Hollywood, “Los Angeles has Hollywood – and hates it” (p. 358). On a visit to the studio, Marlowe runs into the studio’s top executive, Jules Oppenheimer, who appears in the novel apparently for no other reason than to give Chandler an opportunity to comment on the inefficiency of the studio system: “Save fifty cents in this business and all you have is five dollars worth of bookkeeping” (p. 306). Looking out on an expansive studio backlot with a dismissive wave of the hand, and denigrating all writers, directors, and actors in a single breath as the most “expensive talent in the world,” Oppenheimer boasts that he could make a profit from virtually any product if only he controlled the distribution channels: “Doesn’t matter a damn what they do or how they do it. Just give me fifteen hundred theaters” (p. 306).

Recognizing the potential for a monopoly that this vision of a vertically integrated film industry posed, the Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that the major Hollywood studios had to divest themselves of the theatre chains they controlled. That same year, the number of television sets in American households reached one million; and by 1950, there were 11 million (I. Hamilton 1990: 301). After movie attendance peaked in 1946, with more than 90 million tickets sold per week, box office fell by 40 percent over the next 10 years, while overall profits at the major studios declined by 50 percent (Rifkin 2000: 25). Studios faced challenges from other quarters as well. The motion picture industry suddenly came under more direct political scrutiny than ever before, an irresistible target of the government’s rabid anti-Communist efforts. In October 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (commonly referred to by the acronym HUAC) began nine days of hearings into alleged Communist influence in Hollywood. Led by new Committee Chair J. Parnell Thomas, the hearings were a sensation in the national press, with Thomas alleging that “90% of communist infiltration in Hollywood is to be found among screenwriters” (R. Fine 1992: 234). The committee summoned 24 so-called “friendly” witnesses to testify before Congress, including eventual Screen Actors Guild president and later US President Ronald Reagan, studio heads Jack Warner and Walt Disney, and a number of actors such as Robert Taylor and Gary Cooper. During the second week of hearings, 19 suspected Communists, labeled “unfriendly witnesses,” were subpoenaed to testify before the committee. The first witness, John Howard Lawson, began the hearings by refusing to answer the infamous question, “Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Among other unfriendly witnesses called to testify were the screenwriters Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner, Jr., and Dalton Trumbo, plus director Edward Dmytryk and producers Adrian Scott and Herbert Biberman. The 11th person to testify, German playwright Bertolt Brecht, “dissembled rather than defied the committee” (Doherty 2003: 21n). Following Brecht’s testimony, Thomas abruptly suspended the hearings after only 11 of the 19 witnesses had taken the stand. Brecht fled to Europe the following day, and the remaining 10 witnesses who had already testified henceforth became known as the Hollywood Ten. In an unhappy denouement to the whole sorry affair, all 10 served short prison terms for “contempt of Congress” after the Supreme Court refused to hear their cases in 1950 (Belton 2004: 288–9).

Virtually no one involved in the HUAC hearings emerged unscathed; even the movie stars calling themselves the Committee on the First Amendment regretted their association with the hearings. Director John Huston, who was in Washington as part of the group lending support to the witnesses, summed up the disappointment felt by those who saw it as an opportunity to uphold the First Amendment: “You felt your skin crawl and your stomach turn. I disapproved of what was being done to the Ten but I also disapproved of their response. They had lost a chance to defend a most important principle” (I. Hamilton 1990: 293). Regarding what he privately dubbed the “Hollywood show in Washington,” Chandler thought it worth considering that the Hollywood Ten “had very bad legal advice”:

They were afraid to say they were Communists or to say that they were not Communists; therefore they tried to raise a false issue. If they had told the truth, they would have had a far better case before the courts than they have now, and they would certainly have had no worse a case as regards their bosses in Hollywood.

(Chandler 1981: 106–7)

Immediately after the HUAC hearings, studio executives met at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York and emerged from two days of negotiations with the Waldorf Statement, a document that, according to Thomas Doherty, “asserted the determination of Hollywood to stand up to HUAC even as it knuckled under” (Doherty 2003: 22). Claiming that filmmaking “cannot be carried out in an atmosphere of fear,” top executives nonetheless capitulated to the witch-hunt atmosphere, assuring the public that they would never “knowingly employ a communist” (p. 22). The fallout from the HUAC hearings was the blacklist, which contained the names of nearly 300 individuals who were subsequently denied work in the industry. Notwithstanding Billy Wilder’s caustic remark, “Of the unfriendly Ten, only two had any talent; the other eight were just unfriendly,” the blacklist effectively decimated the creative pool in Hollywood (Dick 1980: 10).

The HUAC hearings on Hollywood in 1947 and the Supreme Court ruling of 1948 together sounded the death knell of the studio system, even as they inadvertently heralded a new era for writers in the film industry. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) can be read as an elegy for old Hollywood (I. Hamilton 1990). The film’s protagonist Joe Gillis (William Holden), a former newspaper journalist with two B pictures to his credit, is reduced to writing a vanity screenplay for faded silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who accuses him of ruining movies with excess verbiage: “You made a rope of words and strangled this business.” The movie ends with the writer floating face down in her swimming pool. “I always wanted a swimming pool,” Gillis says in a voice-over from beyond the grave.

Despite the lingering pall cast over the film industry by the blacklist, writers were no longer part of a vertically integrated studio system controlling the filmmaking process from start to finish, but rather freelance writers hired on a per film basis. Chandler had predicted, in 1945, that the “cold dynasty” of the studio system “will not last forever,” and he saw several reasons to hope for a better future for writers:

There is hope that a decayed and make-shift system will pass, that somehow the flatulent moguls will learn that only writers can write screenplays and only proud and independent writers can write good screenplays, and that present methods of dealing with such men are destructive of the very force by which pictures must live.

(Chandler 1995a: 1000–1)

Whether the freelance system that replaced the studio system Chandler decries here actually contributed to better movies is debatable, but one thing is clear: writers would henceforth be relatively unfettered. No longer under contract to a single Hollywood studio, they became free to ply their trade to any mogul, however flatulent, who was willing to take a chance on their scripts. Meanwhile, the expansion of higher education in the postwar period and the institutionalization of formalism in English departments helped to create a much larger market for modern novels, such that a William Faulkner, or Nathanael West for that matter, would very likely be astonished, if not a little bit wistful, to learn how many copies their novels have sold since their deaths.

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