Poets of the Non-Existent City

Though unacknowledged by the larger literary world, which looked down on Southern California as a cultural desert, poetry flourished in the Los Angeles of the 1950s. But the very period during which the arts were burgeoning was shadowed by the work of the regional committees that brought the anti-Communist investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy to Hollywood. Two Los Angeles literary journals, 'The California Quarterly' and 'Coastlines', made a strong stand against McCarthyism. The two published many of the same writers and artists and shared the same liberal politics. Combined, they represent almost thirteen years of poetry and graphic arts in Los Angeles. This book collects for the first time the poems, artwork, and commentary of these journals, long buried in literary archives. As this collection vividly demonstrates, the poets and artists were not intimidated by pressure to refrain from social and political commentary or to write about the uncontroversial.