John Fante

Quotes

• “My father was teaching me his trade. I was his son and he was showing me how to write the way his own father from Torricella Peligna had shown him, as a boy, how to work a wall of stone or lay a row of brick. I was learning how to build books. Watching a master at work. Those would be the most important days of my life.”
• “"A butcher will always cheat a fool," she said.”
• “He closed the door carefully, as though his whole life had been spent in the exact science of closing doors.”
• “His mother had too much God in her.”
• “The afternoon moved like lava.”
• “And I remembered the inside of that apartment, how it smelled of mice and dust, and the old women who sat in the lobby on hot afternoons, and the old woman with the pretty legs. Then there was the elevator man, a broken man from Milwaukee, who seemed to sneer every time you called your floor, as though you were such a fool for choosing that particular floor, the elevator man who always had a tray of sandwiches in the elevator, and a pulp magazine.”

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Key facts

Born

( 1909-04-08 ) April 8, 1909, Denver, Colorado , U.S.

Died

May 8, 1983 (1983-05-08) (aged 74), Los Angeles , California , U.S.

Occupation

Novelist short story writer screenwriter

Period

1936–82

Literary movement

Dirty realism

Notable works

Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938) , Ask the Dust (1939) , Full of Life (1952)

Spouse

Joyce Fante ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1937 ⁠ – ⁠ 1983 ) ​

Children

4, including Dan Fante

via Wikipedia infobox