The Road to Los Angeles

Written in 1936 but not published until after John Fante's death, the novel is one of four built around Arturo Bandini, the author's alter ego. In the order of the Bandini books it falls between Wait Until Spring, Bandini and Ask the Dust. Its first-person narrator is a young man from a poor family whose father has died, and who takes a string of jobs around Los Angeles Harbor after high school. The first is digging an excavation in an empty lot under a cloudless sky beside two cheerful laborers, work that leaves his back aching through the night. Black Sparrow Press brought it out in 1985.

Ryan Holiday named Fante among his best reads of 2011, a year in which he read seven of Fante's novels.