bookshelf

HEMINGWAY AND HIS CONSPIRATORS

Name: HEMINGWAY AND HIS CONSPIRATORS
Author: Leonard J. Leff
ISBN: 0-8476-8544-6

HOLLYWOOD, SCRIBNERS, AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN CELEBRITY CULTURE

by Leonard J. Leff ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1997

bookshelf

Though an entire book could be devoted to Hemingway's ambition or the cultivation of his popular persona, Leff's truncated work is too much a biographical recap. ``I want, like hell, to get published,'' the unknown Parisian expatriate confessed to a correspondent in 1923, long before he would become America's greatest authorial personality. Leff (Film and Literature/Oklahoma State Univ.) suggests that to do so, Hemingway made a Faustian deal with popular culture, ``cultivat[ing] publicity even as he pretended to scorn it''—the kind of publicity available through having bestsellers, serializing in Scribner's magazine, and selling rights to the Book-of-the-Month Club, Broadway, and Hollywood. Hemingway's career began as the all-American cult of personality was born, promoted by Time magazine, radio, and the movie industry. Leff brings up some interesting points, such as Time's puffing of the new author's image as an adventurer in its review of In Our Time, or the parallel reviewers drew (to Hemingwya's annoyance) between the nymphomaniac heroine of the cheaply bestselling The Green Hat and Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. Mostly, Leff sticks close to familiar biographical material rather than analyzing the context, or the apparatuses, of Hemingway's rise to prominence. Leff, the author of studies on movie mogul David O. Selznick and Hayes-era censorship, does better toward his book's end, discussing the production of the 1932 film version of A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway was irritated to see studio PR rehashing the inaccuracies of his legend, but he was also taken in by Gary Cooper playing Frederic Henry, who was based, of course, on Ernest Hemingway. However, at the point where novelist's fame is secured, Leff abruptly leaves off, compressing the rest of his life into an afterword, almost impatient for the author to ride off into immortality. (illustrations not seen)

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-8476-8544-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

bookshelf

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

bookshelf

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

bookshelf

IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

bookshelf

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)