StanleyRoseStory

Stanley Rose -- of whom the above is (so far) the only picture I've been able to find -- was a legendary character in L.A./Hollywood book circles. His bookshop/art gallery (located first on Vine Street, then later on Hollywood Boulevard next door to the Musso & Frank restaurant) was a gathering place during the 1930s for the polyglot literati of the movie industry -- which is to say: screenwriters, and novelists slumming as such while passing through Hollywood (sometimes permanently). Kevin Starr has written: "The bookshop and the bar [at Musso & Frank] operated together with superb synergy, creating a welcomed sense of community for screenwriters suffering from an understandable sense of displacement." Budd Schulberg, author of What Makes Sammy Run, recalled that "the nearest thing we had to a salon (and also a saloon) was Stanley Rose's Book Shop, the back room of which was a hangout for writers, would-be-writers, had-been-writers." Said "back room" inspired the title of critic Edmund Wilson's often-cited 1941 book The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists, a slim volume that derived from a series of essays and book reviews by Wilson that had appeared in The New Republic the previous year. Although Wilson focused his discussion on six individual writers (James M. Cain, John O'Hara, John Steinbeck, Hans Otto Storm, William Saroyan and F. Scott Fitzgerald, with an additional nod to Nathanael West in the book's postscript, and passing mentions of several others), over time the term "boys in the back room" has come to stand, more generally, for the entire school of Hollywood-centered, variously hard-boiled and/or minimalist writers of the 1930s and 1940s. [The Kevin Starr quote above is from Chapter 7 of his book Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s, which I highly recommend for its discussion of the importance of books and bookmen in the cultural life of Los Angeles.]

(Parenthetically, I might add that Musso & Frank's also had a noted "back room," and since Wilson never saw fit to tell his readers -- at least not in the text of the book version -- just how he had settled on that term, we must tentatively regard the literary back room as a bifurcated location. Some time after the closure of Rose's shop (about 1940), Musso & Frank's expanded into the space it formerly occupied -- so that, in essence, Rose's back room became part of the restaurant. I find this utterly poetic. One account has also suggested that Musso & Frank's expansionist desire was actually the impetus for the closure of the bookshop. I find this somewhat less poetic.)

As noted above, Stanley Rose is a legendary figure. There are numerous references to him in the literature pertaining to that time and place -- he figures, at least anecdotally, in many writers' biographies (especially William Saroyan, to whom he was not only a good friend but also a literary agent, and Nathanael West, who I've seen described as Rose's "best friend" among the shop's writer-patrons) -- but as usual with "legendary" characters, the anecdotal accounts are often contradictory and wildly inaccurate. I've done some research, intermittently, over the last year or so, and yet the picture of his life is still pretty sketchy. I hope to find some time, in the near future, to collate my notes into a decent biographical sketch, which I will post here.

In the meantime, I am very keen on finding a photograph of the Stanley Rose Book Shop. If you, who are reading this, have any clues about where such a thing might be located, please get in touch. The best I have so far are a couple of extreme long views of that section of Hollywood Boulevard, in which can be seen his rooftop sign (or, in one photo, just part of it).

For now, I'll just leave you with this little bit of StanleyRoseiana: