More than just a place where movies were made, Hollywood in its "golden years" was a highly charged symbolic site in America. It was a focal point for mass desires and expectations and a symbol of cultural decay and crumbling social values. The popular fiction of those decades -- including novels, short stories, essays, autobiographies, fan magazines, and trade journals -- portrayed the town as a place where hope and failure in American life tragically and inevitably collided. By elevating such themes as sin and redemption, success and failure, betrayal and loss, art and commerce, and illusion and reality to the level of cultural argument, this group of fictional works offered a popular literary forum to question fundamental American assumptions and beliefs. John Parris Springer's incisive readings of these "Hollywood fictions" trace the contradictory ways in which Hollywood was represented and analyze the conflicting images it evoked.