The Reading Room: Books About Beverly Hills and Hollywood, a Starter Shelf

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Beverly Hills has always been as much a story as a place. Here’s a short shelf to start with: novels that shaped how the world imagines this corner of Los Angeles, plus two local histories you can read for free.

The local record

• Pierce E. Benedict, History of Beverly Hills (1934). An early history of the city, published just 20 years after it incorporated. The Beverly Hills Public Library offers a scanned copy in its Local History Collection.
• Robert S. Anderson, Beverly Hills: The First 100 Years. This is a centennial history. It’s where we found the story of the January 1914 incorporation vote in our account of the city’s founding. It’s also listed in the library’s Local History Collection.

Hollywood in fiction

• Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939). A dark, short novel about the people on the edges of the movie business.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (1941). Fitzgerald’s unfinished final novel, about a studio producer, was published after his death.
• Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run? (1941). The classic novel about Hollywood ambition.
• Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays (1970). A spare, unsettling portrait of an actress’s life in Los Angeles.
• Jackie Collins, Hollywood Wives (1983). The best-selling glossy saga of Hollywood marriages and money.
• Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero (1985). About affluent Los Angeles youth in the 1980s.

From the Dossier’s bookshelf

The two cards below are placeholders. The titles that will appear here haven’t been chosen yet.

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