American Rhapsody
Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Ranging from the shattered gentility of Edith Wharton's 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 to link them in surprising ways. It isn't far from Wharton's brave new women to F. Scott Fitzgerald's giddy flappers, and on to the big-screen command of Katharine Hepburn and the dangerous dames of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled world. The improvisatory jazziness of George Gershwin's 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 Williams's blackface performances to James Baldwin's 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pierpont's (Roth Unbound) colorful portraits of writers, actors, and musicians including Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Nina Simone, and George Gershwin, among others, offer a kaleidoscopic mural of America's cultural coming-of-age in the early to mid-20th century. In spite of the book's disjointed nature, though, Pierpont's shining prose provides some bright and memorable moments. Hepburn, she declares, overcomes many obstacles to present us with an image of strength: "We held her close not because she could act but because of the insistent life that hummed through every taut and peremptory inch of her." Dashiell Hammett turns "inarticulateness into a style" and seeks, even more than Gertrude Stein, to strip writing down radically to its essence. Gershwin's music endures because of his vision of the ways that music brings people together: as he wrote, "music always repeats the thoughts and aspirations of the people and the time." Both Bert Williams and Stepin Fetchit use their comic genius to turn the ugliness of racism into a painfully hilarious commentary on American life in the early 20th century. Though each of these characters is interesting in her or his own right, Pierpont doesn't tie them together in any convincing manner, nor do her profiles offer us much in the way of new readings of their lives and work.
