"e;Dan Fante is an authentic literary outlaw."e; New York TimesFrom Dan Fante, son of novelist John Fante, comes an exploration of his familys legacyone of boozing, passion, writing, and survival. Long before his father achieved literary recognition for Ask the Dust or The Road to Los Angeles, and before Dan had conceived his novels 86d, Chump Change, and Mooch, their difficult relationship as father and son evolved in a household where love and literary artistry were often overshadowed by emotional violence. Fante is the story of Dans struggle to find his own voice amidst the madness of his familys dark inheritance, a memoir of his escape from his own vices and his eventual return to Los Angeles to embrace the manand the callingthat once had driven him away.

As father and son John and Dan Fante shared a relationship characterized by competition, resentment, rage and silence. As men, both were driven to succeed by damaged by uncontrollable drinking. As writers, both were gifted with inextinguishable passion. In Fante, Dan Fante traces his family's history from Los Angeles, where John struggles to gain literary recognition and turns instead to the steady paycheck of Hollywood screenwriting, to New York, where Dan finds an escape from his troubled childhood in a life of words and vices.

John was a writer whose literary contributions were not recognized until the end of his life. Dan was an alcoholic saved by writing, who at the age of 45 picked up his father's old typewriter in order to ease the madness in his mind. Fante is the story of the evolution of a relationship between father and son who eventually find their way back to loving each other. In straightforward unapologetic prose, Dan Fante lays bare his family's story from his point of view, with the rage and passion of a writer, which he feels was his true inheritance and his father's greatest gift.