BIOGRAPHY

Dan Fante was born and raised in Los Angeles. At twenty, he quit school and hit the road, eventually ending up as a New York City resident for twelve years. Fante has worked at dozens of crummy jobs including: door to door salesman, taxi driver, window washer, telemarketer, private investigator, night hotel manager, chauffeur, mailroom clerk, deck hand, dishwasher, carnival barker, envelope stuffer, dating service counselor, furniture salesman, and parking attendant. Fante is married and has a two year old son named Michaelangelo Giovanni Fante. He hopes eventually to learn to play the harmonica..

Dan Fante knows a thing or two about surviving America. If you like your prose vodka-soaked, soulful and bleeding on the page, then Fante is your man. Born and raised in California, his father John was one of the finest writers of the twentieth century, yet poor sales begrudgingly forced him into working as a screeenwriter during Hollywood's cinematic boom-time. By the time of his death in the early 1980's, Fante Sr's literary career was unknown to everyone but the die-hards, including one Charles Bukowski who, in his novel "Women" declared Fante his God and set about resurrecting his career. Dan Fante is, in my opinion, an even finer writer than his father. He has lived a life that would kill most people -- acute alcoholism and drug use, poverty, divorce, suicide-attempts, therapy, yet has survived to pick up the pen and tell the tale. Dan Fante isn't some two-bit, woe-is-me tortured writer, this is the real deal. Having read his first novel Chump Change , originally published in France, I couldn't work out why he wasn't one of the most famous writers in America -- but then America has always had a way of shying away from the kind of home truths that Fante's work meets head-on. His words cut through the whole sorry façade, make you feel alive, make you want to smash up the room. His word tears each page a new arsehole. Here is a writer whose work is immediate, outlandish and as downright sick and self-obsessed as any musician, and all the better for it; a writer whose works stands alongside Celine, Hubert Selby Jr and Knut Hamsun as modern confessionals from the gutter.A sequel and prequel, Mooch and Spitting Off Tall Buildings (both Canongate) have followed and Fante recently published his first collection of poetry, A Gin Pissing Raw Meat Dual Carburettor V8 Son Of A Bitch From Los Angeles (Wrecking Ball Press).

(By Ben Meyers | Copyright 2003, 3 A.M. Magazine. All rights reserved)