British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935-1965: Travelers, Exiles, and Expats - Hardcover

"Lisa Colletta has written a lively and engaging study of British and European writers who came to Hollywood in an effort to escape what they saw as a society exhausted by the burden of history, and later fleeing fascism and hoping to create a new artistic and literary home. This book creates a powerful portrait of expatriate writers Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell, and Evelyn Waugh as they grapple with the contrast between the shallow and commodified culture of Hollywood and the complex and tragic past in which British and European writers were embedded." - Wendy Martin, Professor of American Literature and American Studies, Claremont Graduate University, USA and editor of Best of Times, Worst of Times: Contemporary American Short Stories from the New Gilded Age
 
"They would say it was the 'quality of the light,' but surely it was easy money that drew British writers to Hollywood. Few liked it. Most left with big egos and bigger bank accounts. Lisa Colletta has given us a fresh take on a place that everyone thinks they know from a point of view that is not-too-foreign. English literary lions usually criticized Southern California (and the US) less as a friend would and more like an eccentric old auntie." - James J. Berg, editor of Isherwood on Writing
 
"With wit and insight, Lisa Colletta's fascinating and disturbing study shows us how British writers in Hollywood reverse the traditional travelogue, teaching us through their fiction, essays, autobiographies, and letters that the 'old world' and its literature are worth returning to after all.' - Kristin Bluemel, Professor of English, Monmouth University, USA and editor of Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain  
 

Was early Hollywood, with its celluloid dreams and theme-park cemeteries, the beginning of the end of the Western humanist tradition? British Novelists in Hollywood calls attention to the shifting grounds of cultural expression by highlighting Hollywood as