Biography

Eve Babitz was a writer and artist whose work captured Los Angeles with rare wit, sensuality, and intelligence.

Born in Hollywood in 1943, Babitz was the daughter of Sol Babitz, a studio violinist, and Mae Babitz, an artist. She grew up among the city’s musicians, painters, writers, and movie people, with Igor Stravinsky as her godfather, and came of age in the Los Angeles of the 1960s and 1970s, a world she would later make unmistakably her own.

Before she became widely known as a writer, Babitz was deeply involved in the art and music scenes of her time. She designed album covers for artists including Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, and Linda Ronstadt, and in 1963 posed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp in a photograph that became one of the defining images of Los Angeles art history.

Her books, including Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company, and Sex and Rage, move fluidly between memoir, fiction, cultural observation, and social history. In them, Babitz presented Los Angeles not as a cultural wasteland, but as a place of beauty, pleasure, intelligence, and meaning.

She also belonged to one of the most influential literary and artistic circles of postwar Los Angeles, a world that included Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Ed Ruscha, Walter Hopps, Jim Morrison, and many others. But Babitz’s voice was entirely her own: irreverent, intimate, unsentimental, and alive to the glamour and absurdity of the city she knew best.

Long admired by a devoted readership, Babitz’s work reached a broader audience in the years before and after her death. Slow Days, Fast Company was named by The New York Times as one of the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years, and her books have since been recognized as essential works of Los Angeles literature.

Eve Babitz died in Los Angeles in 2021. Her papers are held at the Huntington Library.