American Rhapsody: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building

ISBN: 0374536945

Author: Pierpont, Claudia Roth

Condition: New

The stories of Americas most extraordinary strivers and their failures and triumphsRanging from the shattered gentility of Edith Whartons heroines to racial confrontation in the songs of Nina Simone, American Rhapsody presents a kaleidoscopic story of the creation of a culture. Here is a series of deeply involving portraits of American artists and innovators who have helped to shape the country in the modern age.Claudia Roth Pierpont expertly mixes biography and criticism, history and reportage, to bring these portraits to life and link them in surprising ways. It isnt far from Whartons brave new women to F. Scott Fitzgeralds giddy flappers, and on to the big-screen command of Katharine Hepburn and the dangerous dames of Dashiell Hammetts hard-boiled world. The improvisatory jazziness of George Gershwins Rhapsody in Blue has its counterpart in the great jazz baby of the New York skyline, the Chrysler Building. Questions of an American acting style are traced from Orson Welles to Marlon Brando, while the new American painting emerges in the gallery of Peggy Guggenheim. And we trace the arc of racial progress from Bert Williamss blackface performances to James Baldwins warning of the fire next time, however slow and bitter and anguished this progress may be.American Rhapsody offers a history of twentieth-century American invention and genius. It is about the joy and profit of being a heterogeneous people, and the immense difficulty of this human experiment.