Local Authors:

  • Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and moved to Los Angeles in 1912 
  • Walter Mosley was born and raised in Los Angeles.
  • Raymond Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920 and graduated from Carson High School in Los Angeles, where he still resides.
  • Sandra Tsing Loh
  • T. Jefferson Parker, lives and writes about Newport Beach
  • James Ellroy
  • Charles Bukowski was born and raised in LA and graduated from LA High.  The quintessencial LA writer.
  • John Fante

Los Angeles Guidebooks:

  • Frommer's Los Angeles 2006 
  • Time out Los Angeles, published in  2005 
  • Fodor's Los Angeles 2006
  • Lonely Planet Los Angeles and Southern California, published in 2005
  • Lonely Planet Best of Los Angeles, published in 2006
  • Schmap Los Angeles Guide , free downloadable guidebook with maps and photos

Other Books about Los Angeles: 

  • The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler), turned into a movie in 1946 starring Humphrey Bogart as Phillip Marlowe
  • The Little Sister (Raymond Chandler), turned into a movie (Marlowe) in 1969, starring James Garner as Phillip Marlowe. 
  • The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pychon) This hilarious novel aptly depicts the drug-crazed, absurd, mass-media culture of Southern California during the 1960s.
  • Play It As It Lays by California native Joan Didion.
  • Cinnamon Kiss: New York Times bestseller Walter Mosley’s sizzling novel pits Easy Rawlins against his greatest challenge ever--a terrifying murder during the Summer of Love.
  • Little Scarlet (Walter Mosley): Easy Rawlins returns to solve a mystery set amid the flames of the hottest summer L.A. has ever seen. Just after devastating riots tear through Los Angeles in 1965 - when anger is high and fear still smolders everywhere - the police turn up at Easy Rawlins’s doorstep. He expects the worst, as usual. But they’ve come to ask for his help.
  • Fear Itself (Walter Mosley): Paris Minton doesn’t want any trouble, but in 1950s Los Angeles, sometimes trouble finds him, no matter how hard he tries to avoid it. When the nephew of the wealthiest woman in L.A. is missing and wanted for murder, she hires Jefferson T. Hill, a former sheriff of Dawson, Texas, to track him down and prove his innocence. When Hill goes missing too, she tricks his friend Fearless Jones and Paris Minton into picking up the case.
  • Bad Boy Brawly Brown ((Walter Mosley):  A dazzling new mystery featuring the black L.A. businessman/detective Easy Rawlins,
  • Fearless Jones ((Walter Mosley): As two black men in 1950s Los Angeles, Paris Minton and Fearless Jones have few rights, little money, and no recourse under attack. But they have their friends, their wits, and their knowledge of the way the world really works to help them prevail.
  • Walkin’ the Dog ((Walter Mosley): Socrates Fortlow explores life outside the law in modern-day Los Angeles.
  • Six Easy Pieces (Walter Mosley): Seven new short stories about Easy Rawlins.
  • Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned ((Walter Mosley): Socrates Fortlow has done his time: twenty-seven years for murder and rape, acts forged by his huge, rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered rooms in an abandoned building in Watts. In a place of violence and hopelessness, Socrates offers up his own battle-scarred wisdom that can turn the world around.
  • Black Betty (Walter Mosley): Detective Easy Rawlins returns in a mystery set in 1961 Los Angeles as Easy accepts a job searching for a beautiful woman nicknamed ""Black Betty,"" who works as a housekeeper in Beverly Hills.
  • Devil in a Blue Dress (Walter Mosley): Easy Rawlins, a tough World War II veteran and detective, is hired by a financier and gangster to locate Daphne Monet, a search that leads him from elegant boardrooms to the raucous jazz joints of late 1940s Los Angeles.  This book was made into a feature film starring Denzel Washington.
  • Gone Fishin’ (Walter Mosley): Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins and Raymond "Mouse" Alexander are coming of age -- and everything they ever knew about friendship and about themselves is coming apart at the seams....
  • A Little Yellow Dog (Walter Mosley): With his not-so-simple past snapping at his heels, and with enemies old and new looking to get even, Easy must kiss his careful little life good-bye -- and step closer to the edge....
  • A Red Death (Walter Mosley): In order to avoid a prison sentence for a trumped-up tax evasion charge, Easy Rawlins agrees to infiltrate the First African Baptist Church and spy on alleged communist organizer Chaim Wenzler.    
  • White Butterfly (Walter Mosley): When a white co-ed is murdered in the same way that a series of black women were murdered recently, L.A. police coerce detective Easy Rawlins to become involved in the case.
  • If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now (Sandra Tsing Loh), named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best books of 1997.
  • Depth Takes A Holiday: Essays From Lesser Los Angeles (Sandra Tsing Loh)
  • Aliens In America (Sandra Tsing Loh) a darkly comic semi-autobiographical tale of growing up middle class Chinese-German in Southern California
  • A Year in Van Nuys (Sandra Tsing Loh): The antidote to A Year in Provence -- hilarious musings of a thirty-something coming to grips with suburbia, motherhood and a life on the fringes of the entertainment industry.
  • L.A. Bizarro (Anthony R. Lovett and Matt Maranian):  If you enjoy absurdities and are interested in an irreverant look at Los Angeles, be sure to pick up this book!  It's full of secrets that you'll never find in a regular travel guide.
  • Ask the Dust (John Fante): An aspiring writer's struggle to make it in Los Angeles with a beautiful, loving portrait of Los Angeles.