Don Carpenter wrote about Hollywood like no one else. Hollywood Trilogy collects, for the first time, Carpenter's most significant Hollywood novels--A Couple of Comedians, The Turnaround and The True Life Story of Jody McKeegan--into a single volume. Here readers will find the jungle of "B" movie Hollywood with no attempt to dress up the rawness and vulgarity of this "glamorous" town. Carpenter's characters occupy every facet of Hollywood--there are naive and shy young men trying to break into the business, one-picture wonders, comedy duos, beautiful starlets and middle-aged moguls wondering...

Don Carpenter was one of the finest novelists working in the west. His first novel, A Hard Rain Falling, first published in 1966, has been championed by Richard Price, and George Pelacanos who called it "a masterpiece...the definitive juvenile-delinquency novel and a damning indictment of our criminal justice system," is considered a classic. His novel A Couple of Comedians is thought by some the best novel about Hollywood ever written.

He was a close friend of Evan Connell and other San Francisco writers, but his closest friendship was with Richard Brautigan, and when...