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Becoming Ray Bradbury
By Jonathan R. Eller. 2011
Becoming Ray Bradbury chronicles the making of an iconic American writer by exploring Ray Bradbury's childhood and early years of…
his long life in fiction, film, television, radio, and theater. Jonathan R. Eller measures the impact of the authors, artists, illustrators, and filmmakers who stimulated Bradbury's imagination throughout his first three decades. Unprecedented access to Bradbury's personal papers and other private collections provides insight into his emerging talent through his unpublished correspondence, his rare but often insightful notes on writing, and his interactions with those who mentored him during those early years. Beginning with his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, and Los Angeles, this biography follows Bradbury's development from avid reader to maturing author, making a living writing for pulp magazines. Eller illuminates the sources of Bradbury's growing interest in the human mind, the human condition, and the ambiguities of life and death--themes that became increasingly apparent in his early fiction. Bradbury's correspondence documents his frustrating encounters with the major trade publishing houses and his earliest unpublished reflections on the nature of authorship. Eller traces the sources of Bradbury's very conscious decisions, following the sudden success of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, to voice controversial political statements in his fiction, and he highlights the private motivations behind the burst of creative energy that transformed his novella "The Fireman" into the classic novel Fahrenheit 451. Becoming Ray Bradbury reveals Bradbury's emotional world as it matured through his explorations of cinema and art, his interactions with agents and editors, his reading discoveries, and the invaluable reading suggestions of older writers. These largely unexplored elements of his life pave the way to a deeper understanding of his more public achievements, providing a biography of the mind, the story of Bradbury's self-education and the emerging sense of authorship at the heart of his boundless creativity.Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People (Music in American Life)
By Dan Morgenstern, Barney Josephson, Terry Trilling-Josephson. 2009
Set against the drama of the Great Depression, the conflict of American race relations, and the inquisitions of the House…
Un-American Activities Committee, Cafe Society tells the personal history of Barney Josephson, proprietor of the legendary interracial New York City night clubs Cafe Society Downtown and Cafe Society Uptown and their successor, The Cookery. Famously known as "the wrong place for the Right people," Cafe Society featured the cream of jazz and blues performers--among whom were Billie Holiday, Big Joe Turner, Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Big Sid Catlett, and Mary Lou Williams--as well as comedy stars Imogene Coca, Zero Mostel, and Jack Gilford, the boogie-woogie pianists, and legendary gospel and folk artists. A trailblazer in many ways, Josephson welcomed black and white artists alike to perform for mixed audiences in a venue whose walls were festooned with artistic and satiric murals lampooning what was then called "high society." Featuring scores of photographs that illustrate the vibrant cast of characters in Josephson's life, this exceptional book speaks richly about Cafe Society's revolutionary innovations and creativity, inspired by the vision of one remarkable man.In It for the Long Run: A Musical Odyssey (Music in American Life)
By Jim Rooney. 2014
Inspired by the Hank Williams and Leadbelly recordings he heard as a teenager growing up outside of Boston, Jim Rooney…
began a musical journey that intersected with some of the biggest names in American music including Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Bill Monroe, Muddy Waters, and Alison Krauss. In It for the Long Run: A Musical Odyssey is Rooney's kaleidoscopic first-hand account of more than five decades of success as a performer, concert promoter, songwriter, music publisher, engineer, and record producer. As witness to and participant in over a half century of music history, Rooney provides a sophisticated window into American vernacular music. Following his stint as a "Hayloft Jamboree" hillbilly singer in the mid-1950s, Rooney managed Cambridge's Club 47, a catalyst of the '60's folk music boom. He soon moved to the Newport Folk Festival as talent coordinator and director where he had a front row seat to Dylan "going electric." In the 1970s Rooney's odyssey continued in Nashville where he began engineering and producing records. His work helped alternative country music gain a foothold in Music City and culminated in Grammy nominations for singer-songwriters John Prine, Iris Dement, and Nanci Griffith. Later in his career he was a key link connecting Nashville to Ireland's folk music scene. Writing songs or writing his memoir, Jim Rooney is the consummate storyteller. In It for the Long Run: A Musical Odyssey is his singular chronicle from the heart of Americana.When Frankie Went to Hollywood: Frank Sinatra and American Male Identity
By Karen Mcnally. 2008
This first in-depth study of Frank Sinatra's film career explores his iconic status in relation to his many performances in…
postwar Hollywood cinema. When Frankie Went to Hollywood considers how Sinatra's musical acts, television appearances, and public commentary impacted his screen performances in Pal Joey, The Tender Trap, Some Came Running, The Man with the Golden Arm, and other hits. A lively discussion of sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, and male vulnerability in postwar American culture illuminates Karen McNally's investigation into Sinatra's cinematic roles and public persona. This entertainment luminary, she finds, was central in shaping debates surrounding definitions of American male identity in the 1940s and '50s.Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon
By Vanessa Perez Rosario. 1986
While it is rare for a poet to become a cultural icon, Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding…
and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century. In the first book-length study written in English, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos's development as a writer, her experience of migration, and her legacy in New York City, the poet's home after 1940. Pérez-Rosario situates Julia de Burgos as part of a transitional generation that helps to bridge the historical divide between Puerto Rican nationalist writers of the 1930s and the Nuyorican writers of the 1970s. Becoming Julia de Burgos departs from the prevailing emphasis on the poet and intellectual as a nationalist writer to focus on her contributions to New York Latino/a literary and visual culture. It moves beyond the standard tragedy-centered narratives of de Burgos's life to place her within a nuanced historical understanding of Puerto Rico's peoples and culture to consider more carefully the complex history of the island and the diaspora. Pérez-Rosario unravels the cultural and political dynamics at work when contemporary Latina/o writers and artists in New York revise, reinvent, and riff off of Julia de Burgos as they imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.Ray Bradbury Unbound
By Jonathan R. Eller. 2014
In Ray Bradbury Unbound, Jonathan R. Eller continues the story begun in his acclaimed Becoming Ray Bradbury, following the beloved…
author's evolution from a short story master to a multi-media creative force and outspoken visionary. At the height of his powers as a poetic prose stylist, Bradbury shifted his creative attention to film and television, where new successes gave him an enduring platform as a compelling cultural commentator. His passionate advocacy validated the U.S. space program's mission, extending his pivotal role as a chronicler of human values in an age of technological wonders. Informed by many years of interviews with Bradbury as well as an unprecedented access to personal papers and private collections, Ray Bradbury Unbound provides the definitive portrait of how a legendary American author helped shape his times.Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women
By Thomas H. Pauly. 2005
Zane Grey was a disappointed aspirant to major league baseball and an unhappy dentist when he belatedly decided to take…
up writing at the age of thirty. He went on to become the most successful American author of the 1920s, a significant figure in the early development of the film industry, and a central player in the early popularity of the Western. Thomas H. Pauly's work is the first full-length biography of Grey to appear in over thirty years. Using a hitherto unknown trove of letters and journals, including never-before-seen photographs of his adventures--both natural and amorous--Zane Grey has greatly enlarged and radically altered the current understanding of the superstar author, whose fifty-seven novels and one hundred and thirty movies heavily influenced the world's perception of the Old West.Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews
By Oscar Wilde, Gary Scharnhorst, Matthew Hofer. 1882
Better known in 1882 as a cultural icon than a serious writer, Oscar Wilde was brought to North America for…
a major lecture tour on Aestheticism and the decorative arts. With characteristic aplomb, he adopted the role as the ambassador of Aestheticism, and he tried out a number of phrases, ideas, and strategies that ultimately made him famous as a novelist and playwright. This exceptional volume cites all ninety-one of Wilde's interviews and contains transcripts of forty-eight of them, and it also includes his lecture on his travels in America.George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait (Music in American Life)
By Walter Rimler. 2009
George Gershwin lived with purpose and gusto, but with melancholy as well, for he was unable to make a place…
for himself--no family of his own and no real home in music. He and his siblings received little love from their mother and no direction from their father. Older brother and lyricist Ira managed to create a home when he married Leonore Strunsky, a hard-edged woman who lived for wealth and status. The closest George came to domesticity was through his longtime relationship with Kay Swift. She was his lover, musical confidante, and fellow composer. But she remained married to another man while he went endlessly from woman to woman. Only in the final hours of his life, when they were separated by a continent, did he realize how much he needed her. Fatally ill, unprotected by (and perhaps estranged from) Ira, he was exiled by Leonore from the house she and the brothers shared, and he died horribly and alone at the age of thirty-eight. Nor was Gershwin able to find a satisfying musical harbor. For years his songwriting genius could be expressed only in the ephemeral world of show business, as his brilliance as a composer of large-scale works went unrecognized by highbrow music critics. When he resolved this quandary with his opera Porgy and Bess, the critics were unable to understand or validate it. Decades would pass before this, his most ambitious composition, was universally regarded as one of music's lasting treasures and before his stature as a great composer became secure. In George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait, Walter Rimler makes use of fresh sources, including newly discovered letters by Kay Swift as well as correspondence between and interviews with intimates of Ira and Leonore Gershwin. It is written with spirited prose and contains more than two dozen photographs.Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939
By Roger Daniels. 2015
Franklin D. Roosevelt, consensus choice as one of three great presidents, led the American people through the two major crises…
of modern times. The first volume of an epic two-part biography, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939 presents FDR from a privileged Hyde Park childhood through his leadership in the Great Depression to the ominous buildup to global war. Roger Daniels revisits the sources and closely examines Roosevelt's own words and deeds to create a twenty-first century analysis of how Roosevelt forged the modern presidency. Daniels's close analysis yields new insights into the expansion of Roosevelt's economic views; FDR's steady mastery of the complexities of federal administrative practices and possibilities; the ways the press and presidential handlers treated questions surrounding his health; and his genius for channeling the lessons learned from an unprecedented collection of scholars and experts into bold political action. Revelatory and nuanced, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939 reappraises the rise of a political titan and his impact on the country he remade.Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music
By Christian Wolff, Gordon Mumma. 2015
Composer performer instrument builder teacher and writer Gordon Mumma has left an indelible mark on the…
American contemporary music scene A prolific composer and innovative French horn player Mumma is recognized for integrating advanced electronic processes into musical structures an approach he has termed Cybersonics Musicologist Michelle Fillion curates a collection of Mumma s writings presenting revised versions of his classic pieces as well as many unpublished works from every stage of his storied career Here through words and astonishing photos is Mumma s chronicle of seminal events in the musical world of the twentieth century his cofounding the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music his role in organizing the historic ONCE Festivals of Contemporary Music performances with the Sonic Arts Union and working alongside John Cage and David Tudor as a composer-musician with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company In addition Mumma describes his collaborations with composers performers dancers and visual artists ranging from Robert Ashley and Pauline Oliveros to Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg Candid and insightful Cybersonic Arts is the eye-opening account of a broad artistic community by an active participant and observerFannie Bloomfield-Zeisler: The Life and Times of a Piano Virtuoso
By Beth Abelson Macleod. 2015
One of the foremost piano virtuosi of her time, Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler reliably filled Carnegie Hall. As a "new woman," she…
simultaneously embraced family life and forged an independent career built around a repertoire of the German music she tirelessly championed. Yet after her death she faded into obscurity. In this new biography, Beth Abelson Macleod reintroduces a figure long, and unjustly, overlooked by music history. Trained in Vienna, Bloomfield-Zeisler significantly advanced the development of classical music in the United States. Her powerful and sensitive performances, both in recital and with major orchestras, won her followers across the United States and Europe and often provided her American audiences with their first exposure to the pieces she played. The European-style salon in her Chicago home welcomed musicians, scientists, authors, artists, and politicians, while her marriage to attorney Sigmund Zeisler placed her at the center of a historical moment when Sigmund defended the anarchists in the 1886 Haymarket trial. In its re-creation of a musical and social milieu, Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler paints a vivid portrait of a dynamic artistic life.Herndon on Lincoln: Letters
By Rodney O Davis, William H Herndon, Douglas L Wilson. 2016
After Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, William H. Herndon began work on a brief, "subjective" biography of his former law…
partner, but his research turned up such unexpected and often startling information that it became a lifelong obsession. The biography finally published in 1889, Herndon's Lincoln, was a collaboration with Jesse W. Weik in which Herndon provided the materials and Weik did almost all the writing. For this reason, and because so much of what Herndon had to say about Lincoln was not included in the biography, David Donald has observed, "To understand Herndon's own rather peculiar approach to Lincoln biography, one must go back to his letters." An exhaustive collection of what Herndon was told by others about Lincoln was published by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis in Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln . In this new volume, Wilson and Davis have produced a comprehensive edition of what Herndon himself wrote about Lincoln in his own letters. Because of Herndon's close association with Lincoln, his intimate acquaintance with his partner's legal and political careers, and because he sought out informants who knew Lincoln and preserved information that might otherwise have been lost, his letters have become an indispensable resource for Lincoln biography. Unfiltered by a collaborator and rendered in Herndon's own distinctive voice, these letters constitute a matchless trove of primary source material. Herndon on Lincoln: Letters is a must for libraries, research institutions, and students of a towering American figure and his times.The Magic of Beverly Sills
By Nancy Guy. 2015
With her superb coloratura soprano passion for the world of opera and down-to-earth personality Beverly Sills made…
high art accessible to millions from the time of her meteoric rise to stardom in 1966 until her death in 2007 An unlikely pop culture phenomenon Sills was equally at ease on talk shows on the stage and in the role of arts advocate and administrator Merging archival research with her own love of Sills s music Nancy Guy examines the singer-actress s artistry alongside the ineffable aspects of performance that earned Sills a passionate fandom Guy mines the memories of colleagues critics and aficionados to recover something of the spell Sills wove for people on both sides of the footlights during the hot moments of onstage performance At the same time she analyzes essential questions raised by Sills s art and celebrity How did Sills challenge the divide between elite and mass culture and build a fan base that crossed generations and socio-economic lines Above all how did Sills capture the unnameable magic that joins the members of an audience to a performer--and to one-another Intimate and revealing The Magic of Beverly Sills explores the alchemy of art magnetism community and emotion that produced an American iconFrom Scratch: Writings in Music Theory
By Lauren Pratt, Robert Wannamaker, Michael Winter, James Tenney, Larry Polansky. 2015
One of the twentieth century's most important musical thinkers, James Tenney did pioneering work in multiple fields, including computer music,…
tuning theory, and algorithmic and computer-assisted composition. From Scratch is a collection of Tenney's hard-to-find writings arranged, edited, and revised by the self-described "composer/theorist." Selections focus on his fundamental concerns--"what the ear hears"--and include thoughts and ideas on perception and form, tuning systems and especially just intonation, information theory, theories of harmonic space, and stochastic (chance) procedures of composition.Feminist Writings
By Simone De Beauvoir, Sylvie Le Beauvoir, Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann. 1949
By turns surprising and revelatory this sixth volume in the Beauvoir Series presents newly discovered writings and lectures while…
providing new translations and contexts for Simone de Beauvoir s more familiar writings Spanning Beauvoir s career from the 1940s through 1986 the pieces explain the paradoxes in her political and feminist stances including her famous 1972 announcement of a conversion to feminism after decades of activism on behalf of women Feminist Writings documents and contextualizes Beauvoir s thinking writing public statements and activities in the services of causes like French divorce law reform and the rights of women in the Iranian Revolution In addition the volume provides new insights into Beauvoir s complex thinking and illuminates her historic role in linking the movements for sexual freedom sexual equality homosexual rights and women s rights in FranceRegina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian
By Ethelene Whitmire. 2014
The first African American to head a branch of the New York Public Library NYPL Regina Andrews…
led an extraordinary life Allied with W E B Du Bois Andrews fought for promotion and equal pay against entrenched sexism and racism and battled institutional restrictions confining African American librarians to only a few neighborhoods within New York City Andrews also played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance supporting writers and intellectuals with dedicated workspace at her 135th Street Branch Library After hours she cohosted a legendary salon that drew the likes of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston Her work as an actress and playwright helped establish the Harlem Experimental Theater where she wrote plays about lynching passing and the Underground Railroad Ethelene Whitmire s new biography offers the first full-length study of Andrews s activism and pioneering work with the NYPL Whitmire s portrait of her sustained efforts to break down barriers reveals Andrews s legacy and places her within the NYPL s larger historyPolitical Writings
By Simone De Beauvoir, Sylvie Le Beauvoir, Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann. 2003
Political Writings offers an abundance of newly translated essays by Simone de Beauvoir that demonstrate a heretofore unknown side of…
her political philosophy The volume traces nearly three decades of Beauvoir s leftist political engagement from expos s of conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard-hitting attacks on right-wing French intellectuals in the 1950s to the 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter Djamila Boupacha and a 1975 article arguing for what is now called the two-state solution in Israel In addition this collection includes provocative essays in which Beauvoir analyzes American politics in ways of particular interest to scholars todayBlues All Day Long: The Jimmy Rogers Story (Music in American Life)
By Wayne Everett Goins, Kim Wilson. 2014
A member of Muddy Waters' legendary late 1940s-1950s band, Jimmy Rogers pioneered a blues guitar style that made him one…
of the most revered sidemen of all time. Rogers also had a significant if star-crossed career as a singer and solo artist for Chess Records, releasing the classic singles "That's All Right" and "Walking By Myself." In Blues All Day Long, Wayne Everett Goins mines seventy-five hours of interviews with Rogers' family, collaborators, and peers to follow a life spent in the blues. Goins' account takes Rogers from recording Chess classics and barnstorming across the South to a late-in-life renaissance that included new music, entry into the Blues Hall of Fame, and high profile tours with Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. Informed and definitive, Blues All Day Long fills a gap in twentieth century music history with the story of one of the blues' eminent figures and one of the genre's seminal bands.Alec Wilder
By Philip Lambert. 2013
The music of Alec Wilder (1907-1980) blends several American musical traditions, such as jazz and the American popular song, with…
classical European forms and techniques. Stylish and accessible, Wilder's musical oeuvre ranged from sonatas, suites, concertos, operas, ballets, and art songs to woodwind quintets, brass quintets, jazz suites, and hundreds of popular songs. In this biography and critical investigation of Wilder's music, Philip Lambert chronicles Wilder's early work as a part-time student at the Eastman School of Music, his ascent through the ranks of the commercial recording industry in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, his turn toward concert music from the 1950s onward, and his devotion late in his life to the study of American popular songs of the first half of the twentieth century. The book discusses some of his best-known music, such as the revolutionary octets and songs such as "I'll Be Around," "While We're Young," and "Blackberry Winter," and explains the unique blend of cultivated and vernacular traditions in his singular musical language.