Claudette Colbert
Claudette Colbert

Author: Bernard F. Dick

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2010-02-17

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1628467932

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Claudette Colbert's mixture of beauty, sophistication, wit, and vivacity quickly made her one of the film industry's most famous and highest-paid stars of the 1930s and 1940s. Though she began her career on the New York stage, she was beloved for her roles in such films as Preston Sturges's The Palm Beach Story, Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra, and Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, for which she won an Academy Award. She showed remarkable prescience by becoming one of the first Hollywood stars to embrace television, and she also returned to Broadway in her later career. This is the first major biography of Colbert (1903–1996) published in over twenty years. Bernard F. Dick chronicles Colbert's long career, but also explores her early life in Paris and New York. Along with discussing how she left her mark on Broadway, Hollywood, radio, and television, the book explores Colbert's lifelong interests in painting, fashion design, and commercial art. Using correspondence, interviews, periodicals, film archives, and other research materials, the biography reveals a smart, talented actress who conquered Hollywood and remains one of America's most captivating screen icons.

Mary Higgins Clark
Mary Higgins Clark

Author: Linda De Roche

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2011-03-21

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0313366381

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This incisive exploration probes the relationship between the novels of bestselling author Mary Higgins Clark and the key events and influences of her life. In her 2002 memoir, Kitchen Privileges, Mary Higgins Clark shared the details of her life with her readers, but she offered little significant reflection on those details. For that, readers must look to her fiction, where her themes, characters, and subjects suggest her responses to her life experiences. Mary Higgins Clark: Life and Letters provides readers with an analysis of these connections in a volume that should increase their understanding—and appreciation—of the author and her work. Focusing on subjects associated with the literary elements of representative Clark novels, Linda De Roche explores the relationship between the life of this bestselling author and the books that have won her legions of fans for more than a quarter century. Themes and issues woven into Clark's fiction—such as the role of the past in people's lives, repercussions of violence, and the concept of identity—are considered, while close critical readings uncover psychological, feminist, and sociopolitical interpretations that will delight fans and inform scholars.

The Paul Cain Omnibus
The Paul Cain Omnibus

Author: Paul Cain

Publisher: Overamstel Uitgevers

Published: 2013-12-17

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 9049980686

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Fifteen stories and one novel—hard-boiled classics by an undisputed master Following gangsters, blackmailers, and gunmen through the underbelly of 1930s America on their journeys to do dark deeds, Paul Cain’s stories are classics of his genre. The protagonists of ambiguous morality who populate Cain’s work are portrayed with a cinematic flair for the grim hardness of their world. Fast One, Cain’s only novel, was originally serialized in Black Mask in the 1930s. It introduces us to Gerry Kells, a hard-nosed criminal who still holds fast to his humanity in a Los Angeles that’s crooked to the core. This collection presents Cain’s classic crime writing to a contemporary audience. This ebook features an introduction by Boris Dralyuk.

Scotland's Pariah
Scotland's Pariah

Author: Patrick O'Flaherty

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2015-01-15

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1442619880

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Scotland’s Pariah is the first book to examine the remarkable life of John Pinkerton: antiquarian, poet, forger, cartographer, historian, serial adulterer, bigamist, and religious skeptic. A pugnacious and persistent man of letters who knew and was admired by literary masters such as Edward Gibbon, Horace Walpole, and William Godwin, Pinkerton’s life was full of personal and professional misadventures. Patrick O’Flaherty’s biography presents an engrossing account of Pinkerton’s life and works from his early years in Scotland to his Parisian exile, covering his major editorial, antiquarian, and geographic works. Examining Pinkerton’s involvement in the London literary scene, his conflicted relationship with the rise of Celtic nationalism, and his response to early literary romanticism, Scotland’s Pariah is a shrewd and compassionate evaluation of an astonishing literary life.

The Chicago of Fiction
The Chicago of Fiction

Author: James A. Kaser

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 0810877244

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The importance of Chicago in American culture has made the city's place in the American imagination a crucial topic for literary scholars and cultural historians. While databases of bibliographical information on Chicago-centered fiction are available, they are of little use to scholars researching works written before the 1980s. In The Chicago of Fiction: A Resource Guide, James A. Kaser provides detailed synopses for more than 1,200 works of fiction significantly set in Chicago and published between 1852 and 1980. The synopses include plot summaries, names of major characters, and an indication of physical settings. An appendix provides bibliographical information for works dating from 1981 well into the 21st century, while a biographical section provides basic information about the authors, some of whom are obscure and would be difficult to find in other sources. Written to assist researchers in locating works of fiction for analysis, the plot summaries highlight ways in which the works touch on major aspects of social history and cultural studies (i.e., class, ethnicity, gender, immigrant experience, and race). The book is also a useful reader advisory tool for librarians and readers who want to identify materials for leisure reading, particularly since genre, juvenile, and young adult fiction, as well as literary fiction, are included.