Fitzgerald writes a story about the formidable proprietress of "Freddie's, " the Temple Stage School, which provides child actors for London's West End theaters, a promising child actor and his rival, and a man with wicked plans to rescue Freddie's from insolvency.
A haunting tribute to the heroic pioneers who shaped the American Midwest This powerful novel by Willa Cather is considered to be one of her finest works and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. It tells the stories of several immigrant families who start new lives in America in rural Nebraska. This powerful tribute to the quiet heroism of those whose struggles and triumphs shaped the American Midwest highlights the role of women pioneers, in particular. Written in the style of a memoir penned by Antonia’s tutor and friend, the book depicts one of the most memorable heroines in American literature, the spirited eldest daughter of a Czech immigrant family, whose calm, quite strength and robust spirit helped her survive the hardships and loneliness of life on the Nebraska prairie. The two form an enduring bond and through his chronicle, we watch Antonia shape the land while dealing with poverty, treachery, and tragedy. “No romantic novel ever written in America...is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.” -H. L. Mencken Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American writer best known for her novels of the Plains and for One of Ours, a novel set in World War I, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943 and received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944, an award given once a decade for an author's total accomplishments. By the time of her death she had written twelve novels, five books of short stories, and a collection of poetry.
Although he was a contemporary of Alfred Eisenstaedt and Erich Salomon--and was just as smart and foolhardy--James Abbe is by no means as famous as his legendary colleagues. American-born Abbe published superb photo documentaries featuring Stalin's Moscow, the last years of the Weimar Republic and the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War. Obsessive and fearless, Abbe got close to the dictators of Europe--Hitler, Mussolini, Franco--and in 1932, he was the only American given permission to photograph Stalin. Eventually, photographing world leaders became his specialty. In pursuit of various interests, Abbe made contact with Russian film directors and artists such as Sergej Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Vsevolod Meyerhold, indulging his passion for film, theater, dance and, above all, the mysteries of whatever happened backstage. Many of his pictures--portraits of Rudolph Valentino, Mae West, Josephine Baker and Charlie Chaplin--have become icons of modern photography. Others, like his portrait of Thomas Mann, remained unknown until their recent discoveries. Shown here is a cross-section of the rich catalogue of Abbe's work, in more than 300 tritones.
In a monumental and important work for the Thoroughbred industry, author and pedigree researcher Avalyn Hunter provides extensive pedigree analysis of every American classic race winner from 1914 through 2002.
Today the classics of the western canon, written by the proverbial ''dead white men,'' are cannon fodder in the culture wars. But in the 1950s and 1960s, they were a pop culture phenomenon. The Great Books of Western Civilization, fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion? In A Great Idea at the Time Alex Beam explores the Great Books mania, in an entertaining and strangely poignant portrait of American popular culture on the threshold of the television age. Populated with memorable characters, A Great Idea at the Time will leave readers asking themselves: Have I read Lucretius's De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not?