Diversity Shines at L.A. Festival of Books

The literary persona of Los Angeles was once viewed through the hard-boiled prism of Raymond Chandler’s urban knight, Philip Marlowe, or against the soul-sucking Southern California landscape of Joan Didion.

On Sunday, participants at the Festival of Books spoke of its literary reinterpretation by a new generation of writers and poets whose themes reach deep into Latin America, across the Pacific Rim or into the heart of a rediscovered United States.

More than 100,000 people came to hear authors read from their fiction or discuss their craft during the two-day event, which many described as the most diverse public gathering of a city that sometimes seems divided by its many communities.

“You get everybody under the sun here,” said Edward James Olmos, as he signed copies of “Americanos,” a book on Latino life for which he wrote the preface. “This is probably the best way to bring people together.”

A panel of Orange County authors even took participants “Behind the Orange Curtain” to a place where, they said, crime is low, the weather is great, ambition runs hot and nothing is more sacred than Disneyland.

But if there is an enduring soul to Southern California literature, it is a restless one, shaped by new waves of dreamers and desperate sojourners; from the star-struck loners of Nathaniel West to the kind of maverick upstarts who would quickly be shown the door at the far more durable institutions of Boston and New York.

But today, those who land in Los Angeles are more likely to cross the U.S.-Mexico border than the Great Divide. Many of the new stories discussed at the festival seemed to gravitate closer to the populist urban maelstrom of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” than the lethally vacuous Hollywood of Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays.”

Even the classic noir mystery fiction genre has been reinvented, by writers such as best-selling author Walter Mosley, who immortalized the self-styled black investigator Easy Rawlins in his novel “Devil in a Blue Dress.” Mosley, who unveiled some of his new fiction at a heavily attended panel Sunday, set that novel in the 1940s belle epoque of black Los Angeles, an era when jazz floated out of clubs on Central Street and jobs in munitions factories provided a measure of prosperity for a wave of black Americans from the South--among them members of his own family.

“I wanted to tell a story that hadn’t been told,” Mosley said in an interview at the book festival, which is sponsored by The Times. “It’s a whole period that’s not talked about, not related to. It was harder then to be black. There was no upward mobility, until recently.”

One of the elements altering literature, Mosley said, is the hunger for a broader range of American experiences from the reading public--a shift he applauds.

“In America, black history is American history,” Mosley told his