Ask the Dust is the most popular novel of American author John Fante, first published in 1939 and set during the Great Depression era in Los Angeles.

It is one of a series of novels featuring the character Arturo Bandini as Fante's alter ego, a young Italian-American from Colorado struggling to make it as a writer in Los Angeles.

In 2006, screenwriter Robert Towne adapted the novel into a film, Ask the Dust, starring Salma Hayek and Colin Farrell.

[1][2] Arturo Dominic Bandini is a struggling writer living in a residential hotel in Bunker Hill, a rundown section of Downtown Los Angeles.

Living off oranges, he unconsciously creates a picture of Los Angeles as a modern dystopia during the Great Depression era.

The last Fante dictated to his wife, Joyce, towards the end of his life after complications from diabetes brought about blindness and the amputation of both legs.

[1] Distribution was hampered because Fante's publisher was embroiled in a legal dispute over publication of an unauthorized version of Adolf Hitler's biography Mein Kampf that left it short of funds.

The American author Charles Bukowski cites John Fante's work as a significant influence on his own writing, in particular Ask the Dust, which he had stumbled upon in the public library as a young writer.

Bukowski, who befriended the older author towards the end of Fante's life, wrote a foreword to this novel for the Black Sparrow Press reprint edition.

The title Ask the Dust derives from Knut Hamsun's novel Pan from 1894, in which Lt. Glahn tells the story about the girl in the tower: "The other one he loved like a slave, like a crazed and like a beggar.

In David Foster Wallace's 1987 novel The Broom of the System, Lavache "Stoney" Beadsman has a wooden leg with a hidden drawer in which he keeps marijuana cigarettes and other illegal substances.