Showing results for "Jazz" in Authors

Pigeonholed in popular memory as a Jazz Age epicurean, a playboy, and an emblem of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation's shifting mood and manners after World War I. In Paradise Lost, David Brown contends that Fitzgerald's deepest allegiances were to a fading antebellum world he associated with his father's Chesapeake Bay roots. Yet as a midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, and a perpetually in-debt author, he felt like an outsider in the haute bourgeoisie haunts.

True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times is the story of an American icon, a lasting portrait of Sam Shepard as he really was, revealed by those who knew him best. This sweeping biography charts Shepard’s long and complicated journey from a small town in Southern California to become an internationally known playwright and movie star. The only son of an alcoholic father, Shepard crafted a public persona as an authentic American archetype: the loner, the cowboy, the drifter, the stranger in a strange land.

The story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's creation of Jay Gatsby - war hero and Oxford man - at the beginning of the Jazz Age, when the City of Dreaming Spires attracted an astounding array of intellectuals, including the Inklings, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot.

E. Lynn Harris writes the memoir of his life - from his childhood in Arkansas as a closeted gay boy through his struggling days as a self-published author to his rise as a New York Times best-selling author. In What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, Harris shares an extraordinary life touched by loneliness and depression, but, more important, he reveals the triumphant life of a small-town dreamer who was able through writing to make his dreams - and more - come true.