John Fante & H. L. Mencken

Across twenty-two years, the letters between John Fante and H. L. Mencken, edited with extensive endnotes by Michael Moreau, trace Fante's progress from an occasional short-story writer to a novelist and screenwriter. Mencken, then editing the American Mercury and a social critic of wide influence in his day, begins with brief, polite rejections of Fante's stories, and his dry replies contrast with Fante's effusive praise. Fante's letters reveal ideas that later fed his novels, and one telling 1936 letter has Fante describing how his father fawned over his success, something he could not bear. The exchange lapsed for most of the 1940s and became one-sided as Mencken's health failed, recording a friendship with a mentor Fante never met.

Ryan Holiday said that in 2011, while reading everything by Fante he could find, he also read this collection of letters between Fante and Mencken.