Los Angeles | A Literary History

June 2026.

Chapter in Los Angeles, A Literary History from Cambridge University Press, eds. Michael Docherty and Ignacio López-Calvo.

​IEve Babitz and her contact allergy to hypocrisy and boredom. Joan Didion and Louis Adamic and Harry Carr. Jonathan Gold’s passionate map of the city through food. Mike Davis and Jon Weiner’s radical account of the sixties on Sunset Boulevard. This is an essay about essayists.

It starts with martinis at the Chateau Marmont with Matthew Specktor, author of Always Crashing In The Same Car, a mash-up of memoir and L.A. cultural history—a romance about breaking your own heart against the city’s impossible games.

Did you know that Adamic once worked mucking rocks for the HollywoodLand development?