West of Rome (Mon Chien Stupide) is a book written by John Fante, published in 1985, it has been translated into French in 1987.

John Fante, is the son of Italian immigrants, born in 1909 in Denver, Colorado, he was of modest origin and wrote his first scales at a very young age. He showed his texts to H. L. Mencken, who bought his first short story for the American Mercury, the prestigious magazine he edited, in 1932. Then started a letter-writing friendship between the two men that lasted more than twenty years. In 1933, his first novel, The Road to Los Angeles, was rejected by the publishers and he had to wait five years for Bandini to be published. At the same time, he made his debut in Hollywood studios where, from 1935 to 1966, he participated in the scripts writing for about ten films that allowed him to live comfortably.

His novels fell into relative oblivion until Charles Bukowski, who worshipped him, undertook, with his friend and publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, to reprint Demand to Dust (Ask the Dust, 1939). At the end of his life, in 1978 he became blind and dead-ended by complications of his diabetes and dictated his last novel, Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982) to his wife Joyce. John Fante died in 1983. My Stupid Dog and The Orgy were released in 1985.

An autobiographical novelist, Fante has only ever told one story in his novels, his own. That of a second-generation immigrant, from his father, mother, brothers and sisters and their talkative and Catholic neighbors, also Italians. He also tells of his vagrancy in Hollywood, the easy money in which one drowns, and then the choice of poverty which is that of writing.