"The promotional literature that lured sun-starved Midwesterners to Southern California in the 1880s hyped the region as the New Eden. But the novelists who created our vision of Los Angeles soon began to see it as Dystopia rather than Utopia, a corrupt, unreal city foreshadowing and reflecting all that is wrong with America. David Fine traces the history of the place through the work of the authors who have defined it in our imaginations."--BOOK JACKET.