Acclaim for THE GIRL FROM HOLLYWOOD
This Hollywood story of 1924 by the creator of Tarzan reflects the tensions between the agrarian dream of California — utopian life on the bountiful land — and the tawdry modernity of the Jazz Age represented by Los Angeles: a cesspit of rapacious directors, the sex trade, drug addiction, alcoholism, and crime. Most interesting is the novel’s moral conundrum — in a utopia, what outlet is there for youth’s restlessness and ambition, besides out and, most likely, down?
— Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander
& The Revolution of Marina M.
Mr. Burroughs, having exhausted the apes and the Martians, has now brought his pen to bear on one of the most interesting and sordid sections of mere humanity. The interest of Hollywood is natural enough; its sordidness, according to accounts, is mainly due to the herding together of actors and actresses whose salaries are, for the most part, grotesquely disproportionate to their abilities. Mr. Burroughs keeps away from personalities but spares us no detail of the general scene: drug fiends and vampires advance from his pages almost as realistically as, in their professional moments, they loom from the screen. A powerful foil is needed for these distressing disclosures; the dramatic values and the popular voice alike demand one. Mr. Burroughs obliges by importing into the milieu of his story a palpably healthy breeze from the adjacent West, an indisputably strong man, and an ingénue whose “innocence,” though it might captivate Tarzan, would certainly seem suspect to Freud. It will be interesting to see if “The Girl from Hollywood,” which, like its predecessors, has obvious merits as a succès de sujet, will come to share their enormous vogue. The path is clear, and it would be as unfair as futile to attempt any further influence on the popular verdict.
— The Spectator, London, April 5, 1924
“How wonderful that the Los Angeles Review of Books has resurrected this forgotten classic set in 1920s L.A. that rings with timeless truth about Hollywood’s twisted allure but also waxes lyrical about the rolling hills and canyons that Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan and Tarzana, once called home. The naïve starlets, dodgy directors, morphine addicts, cowboys, rum-runners, aspiring writers, and gentlemen ranchers of a century past are vivid, flawed characters, and the precise, poetic descriptions of open land now ravaged by development and forest fires will make you weep. This is a melodramatic page-turner that by turns enthralls and shocks while presenting a keyhole into a vanished era with haunting resonance to our own. Drop everything and buy The Girl From Hollywood. This is an imprint to watch, and as a student of L.A. history, I can’t wait to see what LARB publishes next.”
—Denise Hamilton, former LA Times reporter,
crime novelist, and editor of the award-winning
Los Angeles Noir I and Los Angeles Noir 2:
The Classics short story anthologies
THE GIRL FROM HOLLYWOOD
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
Introduction by Steph Cha
LARB CLASSICS
This is a LARB Classics publication
Published by The Los Angeles Review of Books
6671 Sunset Blvd., Suite 1521, Los Angeles, CA 90028
www.larbbooks.org
Introduction copyright © 2019 by Steph Cha
ISBN 978-1-940660-47-9
Library of Congress Control Number 2018965704
Designed by Tom Comitta
Contents