[PEN-L:4423] Mike Davis's NYT Admissions

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

      Following up on Louis Proyect's piece on Mike Davis and LA, I would
note that in the 1940s there was some basis for a claim of LA being some
sort of "Athens," if at best a rather second rate one.   There were two main
sources of this, the academic institutions and Rand Corporation (a 50s
operation) not being much of a base (no insults intended to listmembers
located at LA academic institutions, some of whom are friends of mine).
     One was Hollywood.  There was a well-known phenomenon in the 30s
extending into the 40s of Hollywood hiring some famous and genuinely good
writers to do screenwriting.  William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald are
two obvious examples, along with Nathanial West himself.  And then there
were all those lefty screenwriters who got blacklisted in the 50s but were
going great guns in the 40s, especially in WW II with all the alliance with
the Soviets stuff.  Of course some of these writers suffered angst from
selling out and/or had major alcohol problems, although some of them had
that to begin with, e.g. Faulkner and Fitzgerald especially.
      The other was that LA was a favored destination (after New York) for
European emigre intellectuals fleeing from Hitler.  Marcuse ended up in San
Diego, and some of these people went back to Europe after the war, but
Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg are two prominent and hardly the only
examples of such types.  Thus, around 1945 LA had a pretty significant
concentration of non-academic serious intellectuals of world class calibre.
Barkley Rosser