Anita Loos’s remarkable career as a screenwriter, novelist, playwright and autobiographer stretched over a period of seventy years. Many sources give her date of birth as 1893, but in fact, she regularly subtracted at least five years from her age, and her intriguing but unreliable autobiographical writing is deliberately vague about dates. Loos and her brother and sister were brought up in San Francisco, Los Angeles and later San Diego, where her father, the journalist and humorist R. Beers Loos, set up a theatre. In her memoir

A Girl Like I

(1966), Loos recalls acting in her father’s stock company as a young girl, and watching all the silent films he showed in his theatre, an experience which inspired her to begin writing scenarios.

Her first scenario, signed A. Loos, was bought by

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Citation: Hammill, Faye. "Anita Loos". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 January 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2789, accessed 19 March 2024.]

2789 Anita Loos 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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