The Golden West

In the spring of 1937, Brooklyns Daniel Fuchs, twenty-seven years old and already the author of three remarkable novels (now collected as The Brooklyn Novels), came to Hollywood to bang out a treatment of one of his short stories. His thirteen-week contract turned into a permanent residenceand a lifelong love affair with the movie business. Fuchs worked with the best: Warner and M-G-M and RKO, Wilder and Huston and Joe Pasternak, Raft and Cagney and Doris Day. He spent his days crafting screenplays, but off the lot he continued to write prose, mainly stories for Colliers and The New Yorker and non-fiction Letters from Hollywood for Commentary. The Golden West collects, for the first time, the best of Fuchs writings about studio life, from a novice screenwriters anxious first impressions to a fifty-year veterans mellow memoirs. Fuchs may have loved Hollywood, but he saw life as it is, gold and tinsel both, and described it without falling into easy sentiment or condescending laughter.