One of the great outsider figures of twentieth-century literature, John
Fante possessed a style of deceptive simplicity, full of emotional
immediacy and tremendous psychological point. Among the novels, short
stories and screenplays that comprised his career, Fante's crowning
accomplishments were, for many, his four stories about a certain
uncomplicated character from the hills of Abruzzi. Collected together in
one volume for the first time, The Bandini Quartet tells of Arturo Bandini,
Fante's fictional alter ego, an impoverished young Italian-American who,
armed with only a Jesuit high school education and the insane desire to
write novels, escapes his suffocating home in Colorado to seek glory in a
Depression-era Los Angeles. This edition also includes the first-ever UK
publication of Dreams From Bunker Hill, the brilliant and final novel which
a blind and wheelchair-bound Fante, nearing his death bed, dictated to his
wife Joyce.