Place History: How an L.A. bookshop became the house bar of a literary golden age

The New Room inside Musso & Frank’s Grill in 1955, which took over the area as soon as occupied by Stanley Rose’s bookshop.

(Musso & Frank’s Grill)

This story is a part of Lit Metropolis, our complete information to the literary geography of Los Angeles.

Raymond Chandler used it because the mannequin for Arthur Geiger’s bookstore in his 1939 debut novel, “The Huge Sleep.” Edmund Wilson took the title of “The Boys within the Again Room” — his 1941 research of California authors James M. Cain, John O’Hara, John Steinbeck, William Saroyan and F. Scott Fitzgerald — from the clubhouse within the rear. Budd Schulberg known as it “the closest factor to a Left Financial institution we had on the market.” For all of them, in addition to different writers in Los Angeles throughout the Nineteen Thirties, the Stanley Rose E book Store, situated at 6661½ Hollywood Blvd., subsequent door to Musso & Frank, was each gathering area and watering gap, a house away from dwelling.

Rose was, by all accounts, an unlikely littérateur: a rough-hewn Texan who, in keeping with Jay Martin’s “Nathanael West: The Artwork of His Life,” “had not gone past the fourth grade and had not realized to learn till he was wounded in World Struggle I.” In 1928, as a accomplice within the aptly named Satyr, one other Hollywood bookshop, Rose spent 60 days in jail after being convicted of pirating Stylish Sale’s salacious novel “The Specialist.” He opened his eponymous retailer in 1935 with monetary help from crusading journalist Carey McWilliams and have become Saroyan’s agent. He was additionally a smooth contact who, as Martin writes, “beloved writers, lent them cash, allow them to signal his title at Musso & Frank’s.” Such profligacy in the end led to the store’s demise in 1939.

All through its quick life, nonetheless, the Stanley Rose E book Store turned nothing lower than a Southern California cultural middle, not least due to its again room. Writers together with Saroyan, Schulberg and Fitzgerald, in addition to William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Horace McCoy, John Fante, Erskine Caldwell and John O’Hara, drank and talked and fought there. West and Rose turned shut associates. The room was additionally used as a gallery; Rose gave artists resembling Paul Klee, Alexander Calder and Henry Moore their earliest California exhibits. Particularly at a time when Los Angeles was thought to be provincial — “I've the very best author on the planet — for peanuts,” Jack Warner as soon as boasted of Faulkner, beneath contract for $300 per week — Rose, like his up to date, bookseller and writer Jake Zeitlin, noticed the place by means of the lens of its aesthetics. It was a radical and groundbreaking transfer.

Literary Los Angeles

After the bookstore shut down, its area was taken over by Musso & Frank, which constructed the so-called New Room on the positioning in 1954. That eating room options the bar and different fixtures from the restaurant’s personal Again Room, which had been a personal area for actors and different artists, together with many members of Rose’s coterie. A 2019 LAist piece cites Kevin Starr, who in “Materials Goals: Southern California Via the Nineteen Twenties” noticed: “The bookshop and the bar operated along with very good synergy.” That that is what bookstores and bars accomplish that usually is solely the purpose. Whether it is now not a lot remembered, then, the Stanley Rose E book Store lingers as a touchstone — or higher but, a template of Los Angeles literary life.

Ulin is the previous guide editor and guide critic of The Occasions.