Near the beginning of “All About Eve,” Hollywood’s definitive portrait of Broadway, a talented young theater director announces that he’s going to Los Angeles to make a picture with Darryl Zanuck. Eve Harrington, the titular backstabber, immediately protests: “Why do you have to go out … there? So few come back.” Anne Baxter’s breathy, contemptuous “there” encapsulates New York’s age-old view of the movie business as a Circe’s island, where men who used to be artists wallow greedily at the golden trough. We think of Actors’ Studio types like Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, deformed by their fame; of great novelists like Fitzgerald and Faulkner, patronized and overpaid until they burned out.

At first sight, the career of Daniel Fuchs, who died in 1993 at the age of 84, looks like another of these sad devolutions. In the 1930s, Fuchs published a series of well-received novels about Jewish life in Brooklyn – “Summer in Williamsburg,” “Homage to Blenholt,” and “Low Company.” When they were reissued, decades later, as the “Williamsburg Trilogy,” they earned their author a minor place in the pantheon of Jewish-American literature. But they never sold well enough to rescue him from his low-paid job as a substitute teacher. “A man sits in a room, writing novels,” he recalled in a 1989 essay. “Nothing happens. They don’t sell – four hundred copies apiece, the last one a few more.”

So Fuchs, emboldened by his success in selling stories to magazines, quit his job and went to Hollywood on a 13-week screenwriting contract. And just as Eve predicted, he never came back: For the rest of his career he toiled in the studio vineyards, with a fair amount of success. He is credited as a screenwriter on some dozen films, including the James Cagney-Doris Day musical “Love Me or Leave Me,” for which he won an Oscar in 1956. But there are no really great movies on Fuchs’s resume, no “Citizen Kane” or “Chinatown.” It is all too easy to imagine him in old age cursing Hollywood, lamenting that he could have been a rival to Malamud and Bellow and Roth. Even Fuchs’s own friends, he wrote, tried to seduce him to regret: “I can rely on old friends to remind and reprove me. What happened to you? Why have you fallen into silence? Why have you stopped writing?”

But “The Golden West” (Black Sparrow, 256 pages, $24.95), the new collection of Fuchs’s stories and memoirs about Hollywood, is anything but regretful. It may be, in fact, the most positive account of the screenwriter’s life ever offered by a writer of genuine literary gifts, a standing rebuke to Hollywood grotesques from Pat Hobby to Barton Fink. Fuchs’s Hollywood is no sinkhole of wasted talents, but a kingdom of opulence and energy, of comradeship and intelligent labor. The first piece in the collection, an essay on “Writing for the Movies” that first appeared in Commentary in 1962, offers a ringing defense of movies and moviemakers:

Isn’t it true that a good deal of what we know of the world comes from these men – from their pictures, from their lore? Isn’t it true that they had an amazingly penetrating effect, people in countries all over the world running eagerly to see their pictures, to share in their virility, in their realism and gusto and command of life? I think it is a foolish scandal that we have the habit of deriding these men and their industry, that it is the mode. … What they produced, roistering along in those sun-filled, sparkling days, was a phenomenon, teeming with vitality and ardor, as indigenous as cars or skyscrapers or highways, and as irrefutable.

The qualities Fuchs admires in Hollywood are the same ones that make his own writing so appealing. Fuchs’s prose has the “vitality and ardor,” the racy colloquialism, that distinguishes Jewish-American fiction at its best. This is most obvious in his Yiddish-inflected dialogue, full of skewed grammar and bilious wit: “For my part she can go walking out into the ocean until her hat floats”; “Fannie, don’t stand me on my head.” But it is also evident in Fuchs’s sympathy for characters more tart than sweet, whose natural form of expression is the tirade. In his story “Triplicate,” Rogers Hammet – based on Fuchs’s own benefactor, the famous producer Jed Harris – delivers a speech that is both an example of and a panegyric to this kind of rhapsodic egotism: “There’s nothing more satisfying for an artist than to work to the limits of his strength. You don’t know what happens when you break through. You become important to yourself. Your spirits soar. No one can touch you.”

Throughout the nine pieces included in “The Golden West” – the earliest from 1937, the last from 1989 – Fuchs insists that this sort of “break through,” this artist’s elation, is just as available to the Hollywood screenwriter as to the solitary novelist. In “Writing for the Movies,” he describes the rapture that comes from getting a scenario right: “This was one of those stories, touched with grace and blessed. It went kindly. It became vigorous and spunky with life.”

At the same time, Fuchs suggests that everything monstrous about Hollywood – all its storied craziness and cruelty – comes from the extreme difficulty of making a picture “go kindly.” For as the screenwriter William Goldman famously declared, the first rule of Hollywood is that “Nobody knows anything”; this means that every new project is a nerve-wracking leap into the unknown, a desperate attempt to regain past glories. Goldman’s dictum is usually taken as a joke, but in “West of the Rockies,” a full-length novella first published in 1971, Fuchs shows that it has a serious human cost.

Adele Hogue, Fuchs’s neurotic heroine, is a famous, often-divorced star – a blend of Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, and Lana Turner – whose latest nervous breakdown is jeopardizing her new movie. The story concerns the machinations of her producers, her agent, and her ex-lover to get her back to work. But unlike all those parasites, who are merely impatient with her self-destructive behavior, Fuchs wants us to understand that Adele’s suffering is inseparable from the serendipitous magic of the movies, their refusal to yield to formula or control.

“Every time you finish a picture,” Adele explains, “you have to go into business and start from scratch all over again. You don’t know what it is when you can’t do it, when you come up empty. … You stand there, trying to remember what you once did, what it was you once had, trying to get it back.”

In passages like these, Fuchs shows the sympathy, accuracy, and literary distinction that make him one of the best American writers about the movies. “The Golden West” makes the reader grateful that Daniel Fuchs went to Hollywood – and lived to tell the tale.