Old habits die hard. That’s what I thought when I read Shalom Auslander’s recent rant against Los Angeles, its inhabitants, and everything it stands for, on the Nextbook Web site. The headline, “Killing Spree,” not only summed up the violent reaction that Los Angeles inspires in Mr. Auslander, a short story writer from New York: “I am reminded almost daily of the time God wanted destroy Sodom,” he writes. It also situates him in a long line of writers in whom the City of Angels has inspired irrational fantasies of destruction. Ever since Nathanael West’s hero in “The Day of the Locust” (1939) painted a masterpiece called “The Burning of Los Angeles,” writers — especially those just arrived from somewhere else — have dreamed about disasters that would punish a city that seemed to have no use for them, except as highly paid slaves of Hollywood.

But this habit, always dubious, looks positively out of date to anyone who knows the truth about literary Los Angeles. In fact, there has never been a shortage of serious, gifted writers in Los Angeles and its surroundings. Starting with Helen Hunt Jackson, who invented the legend of Spanish California in “Ramona” (1884), the city has been home to Upton Sinclair and Carey McWilliams, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, Ray Bradbury and John Fante, to name just a few. Natives or transplants, they helped to give L.A. a literature as distinctive as that of any city in America.

Today, even a short list of Southern California writers would include eminent older figures like Carolyn See and John Rechy, literary bestsellers like Janet Fitch and T.C. Boyle, and rising stars like Aimee Bender. No wonder David St. John, a poet who teaches at the University of Southern California, says that Los Angeles is a “terrific place to be a writer,” with “a huge literary community of poets and fiction writers and playwrights.”

In the last decade, however, Los Angeles has fortified this reservoir of talent with a new sense of literary community, and a growing literary infrastructure. The two go hand in hand. If New York remains the literary capital of America, it is because writers here feel that they are a central part of what the city means and does. And they can feel that way because of the publishing houses and magazines and readings and parties that make literary life visible and even, at moments, glamorous.

For a long time, the movie business seemed to suck up all the available oxygen in Los Angeles. It was a movie town, the way Detroit was an automobile town, and everything else was peripheral. But in the last decade, the opening of the Getty Museum and Disney Hall have given L.A. the chance, and the right, to regard itself as a world-class cultural center. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, at the same time, L.A.’s writers and readers have become more assertive, more cohesive, and more willing to claim their place in the always shining California sun.

One of the biggest engines of that change is the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which started in 1996 and now draws around 130,000 people to the University of California’s Los Angeles campus each spring. The festival features hundreds of readings, panels, and book signings, as well as a fair with exhibition booths from publishers and booksellers. The weekend kicks off with a ceremony for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, which have become one of the country’s most prestigious literary awards. The sheer outpouring of enthusiasm for the festival makes it a dramatic demonstration of L.A.’s appetite for literature, and a reminder that Southern California is the nation’s largest book-buying market. For writers, it also serves as a megasalon, a chance to meet, network, and exchange admirations and enthusiasms.

That opportunity is especially important in a city as vast as Los Angeles, where writers don’t run into one another on the street or the subway. “When I first moved here in the 1980s,” said Kate Gale, president of the West Coast branch of PEN, the book world in Los Angeles “was so spread out that people did not get to know each other and there wasn’t much connection.” But Ms. Gale is convinced that all that “is shifting. The interest in books, literature, and literacy is on the rise in L.A.”

Ms. Gale’s own publishing house, Red Hen Press, which she cofounded in 1994, is part of that change. Red Hen releases 16 to 20 books a year from its office in the San Fernando Valley, and in 2004 it launched a literary journal, the Los Angeles Review. It was joined the same year by two other little magazines edited out of Los Angeles, which have earned national profiles: “Swink,” which calls itself a “bicoastal, biannual” magazine “that pushes the boundaries of the traditional,” and “Black Clock,” edited by longtime L.A. novelist Steve Erickson and sponsored by the California Institute of the Arts.

Such journals are helping to diversify the literary landscape in important new ways. So are bloggers like Mark Sarvas, whose book blog, The Elegant Variation, combines literary news with sharp, sometimes combative commentary. Recently, Mr. Sarvas followed a post celebrating his love of “The Great Gatsby” with a report on the closing of the Beverly Hills branch of Dutton’s Bookstore — the kind of seamless blend of the local and the universal that is increasingly evident in L.A.

Even after that closing — which was as widely regretted among L.A. readers as the closing of Coliseum Books here — Dutton’s Brentwood location, one of L.A.’s literary shrines, remains in business. Along with Book Soup in West Hollywood and Vroman’s in Pasadena, that gives L.A. more major independent bookstores than Manhattan. Yet that kind of New York-centric comparison, long a staple of literary discussion on the West Coast (as in other parts of the country), is on the wane in Los Angeles. “I find there’s less and less of a need to compare or justify ourselves to New York, which is refreshing and promising,” Mr. Sarvas says.

To David L. Ulin, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, that freedom from invidious comparisons is what defines the new literary L.A. Mr. Ulin knows all about the condescension of East Coast visitors to “La La Land.” He edited the Library of America’s “Writing Los Angeles” volume, where mandarins like Edmund Wilson and Simone de Beauvoir can be found holding forth about a city they visited for a few months, at best. “For the first 50, 60 years of the century,” Mr. Ulin says, Los Angeles’s literary image was forged “by people who came from elsewhere. In the last 20, maybe 30 years,” however, “writing about Los Angeles has shifted, so you’re seeing more homegrown writers or writers who have come here to stay. Mr. Ulin cites writers like D.J. Waldie and Jennifer Price as pioneers of a new kind of “boundaryless nonfiction,” which may turn out to be a defining L.A. genre.

In fact, he says, the only thing New York has that literary L.A. needs is a general-interest magazine like the New Yorker, one that “speaks for the culture in a way that’s broad and various.” That, and a good public transportation system. After all, Mr. Ulin points out, “You’re not going to read in your car.”

akirsch@nysun.com