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Acclaim for Merton of the movies

“At once satire and classic Hollywood tale, Merton of the Movies made me long for the Los Angeles cafeterias of John Fante, Nathaniel West’s studio backlots, and the early days of Musso and Frank when Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin would horse race down Hollywood Boulevard, the loser picking up the tab. A blistering, rollicking adventure in La La Land, before it got its Tinseltown fame.”

— Liska Jacobs, author of Catalina

“Harry Leon Wilson’s Merton of the Movies was the first great comic novel about Hollywood filmmaking in the 1920s, with all of its attendant artifice and illusion. It remains a prescient and hilarious examination of the performative nature of the modern self in a culture dominated by film and media images.”

— John Paris Springer, author of Hollywood Fictions:

The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature

“Merton of the Movies is and will always remain a delight of the American Dream run aground and a classic tale of the silent movie era. Dark and comic and darkly comic, it joyfully knocks down the façades of old Hollywood to reveal the desperation behind the scene while never ceasing to entertain.”

— Ivy Pochoda, author of Wonder Valley

“It’s notoriously hard to make comedy out of the movies. That whole world is so absurd, so improbable, so filled with grotesques that the reality is more fantastical than most writers can invent. Merton of the Movies succeeds by having at its center a naïve but likable everyman, whose apparently unrealistic fantasies, in some deeply ironic sense, come true.

For the author, and perhaps for any writer of comedy, style is everything. Harry Leon Wilson’s prose is sometimes hilariously artificial, sometimes effortlessly satiric, sometimes downright postmodern. It has echoes of Perelman, Wodehouse, and Thurber, and is not shown up by those comparisons.”

— Geoff Nicholson, author of The Miranda