Dan Fante, Underground Writer and Author of ‘Chump Change,’ Dead at 71

Like his father, “Ask the Dust” author John Fante, he painted colorful portraits of his city

Author Dan Fante, who boozed, scrapped and wrote his way out of the considerable shadow cast by his father and fellow novelist John Fante, died Saturday. He was 71.

Fante was born and died in Los Angeles, and he painted colorful prose portraits of life on the hustle in the city. Several of his books and plays, including the novel “Chump Change” and “Short Dog/Cab Driver Stories From the L.A. Streets,” drew on his experiences as a telemarketer, taxi driver, private investigator, salesman and Santa Monica Pier carnival barker.

His famous father did the same thing in his books including “Ask the Dust,” a seminal L.A. story that was adapted for the big screen in a 2006 film of the same name by “Chinatown” screenwriter Robert Towne, a friend of Fante Sr.’s.

While their works both drew on tumultuous love affairs with Los Angeles, their writing styles were very different, according to journalist and author Evan Wright, a friend of the son.

“Dan always got knocked as a wannabe rival of his father’s. Not true,” he said. “In a nutshell, John Fante became famous after he was rediscovered by Charles Bukowski (and by Towne), but he wrote in a very non-Bukowski manner, kind of a classic, spare 1930s prose.

“Dan, the son, actually wrote more in the tradition of Bukowski — wild, nonliterary, but full of sparks and profanities, yet from the standpoint of a narrator who actually gets sober at some point. It’s sort of like Bukowski 2.0.”

His “Chump Change,” “Mooch,” “86’d” and “Spitting Off Tall Buildings” comprise a trilogy about cab driver Bruno Dante, his hard living alter-ego. Like many of the younger Fante’s works, they found more acclaim in Europe than in the States. “Chump Change” was first published in France and the U.K.’s Canongate published the trilogy, before Sun Dog Press put it out in the U.S. in 1998.

Dan Fante didn’t write his first novel until he was 50 years old, and was referred to as “an authentic literary outlaw” in a New York Times profile. His late start was in part attributable to the breakneck booze-and drug-filled lifestyle that fueled his books and two plays, “The Closer” (aka “Boiler Room”) and “Don Giovanni.”

“Dan was sober for maybe 31 years at the time of his death, and no doubt getting sober is what enabled him to write and have a literary career,” said Wright, who was in the same Alcoholics Anonymous program as Fante.

Wright, best known for his 2004 Iraq War book “Generation Kill,” recalled an episode that typified the relationship between Dan and his father, who died in 1983.

“He was commissioned to write a biography of his father by a major publisher, and did so. It was published,” said Wright. “But rather than being a hagiography it was account of how screwed up his family was and how he and his father barely knew each other — due to both father and son having impossible personalities.”

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