Brenda Wineapple – författare

From an award-winning author, the story of the man and mayor who, with savvy and grit, fought for honest government and progressive ideals in New York and beyondFiorello La Guardia (1882–1947) is still remembered as one of New York City’s most ambitious, pugnacious, and effective politicians. With steely resolve, this maverick Republican led the city from 1934 to 1945—through the Great Depression and World War II—championing a new style of urban progressivism. Committed to delivering honest government, affordable housing, clean streets, and reliable public transportation, La Guardia energetically oversaw the building of hospitals, parks, public schools, clinics, and a municipal airport. And attuned to the slights many citizens were forced to endure, he was determined to protect the dignity of workers, immigrants, and refugees.Brenda Wineapple follows La Guardia’s rise, from his childhood in Arizona and then Europe through his ascent in New York politics and to the US House of Representatives, where he served during the 1920s. She reveals that while he was the city’s first Italian American mayor, La Guardia was also deeply influenced by his Jewish roots—his mother was Jewish and his sister a Holocaust survivor—and examines how this identity helped shape his abhorrence of fascism, nativism, and unfair privilege, while also informing his internationalism, as well as his belief in a more perfect America.

Devoted, eccentric, and compelling, Gertrude and Leo Stein were constant companions, from childhood to adulthood, until, finally, they spoke no more. Americans, expatriates, and virtually orphans, they lived together for almost forty years, collaborating in one of the great artistic and literary adventures of the twentieth century. Sister Brother tells the story of that adventure and relationship. With a personality that drew people toward her—regardless of what they thought of her inventive, hermetic prose—Gertrude Stein dazzled and perplexed. Enigmatic, intelligent, and self-absorbed, Leo also dazzled but in his own way. One of the crucial figures in Gertrude's early years, he was the original guiding spirit of the famed salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, which continued for almost two decades. From her early days as a medical student to her first days in Paris, Gertrude was passionately driven toward the career in which she distinguished herself, demanding appreciation as an exceptional writer who knew precisely what she intended. This book shows how Gertrude slowly struggled with what became a unique voice—and why her brother spurned it. With its wealth of new and rare material, its reconstruction of Leo's famed art collection, and its array of characters—from Bernard Berenson to Pablo Picasso—this biography offers the first glimpse into the smoldering sibling relationship that helped form two of the twentieth century's most unusual figures.

The daughter of an Indianapolis mortician, Janet Flanner really began to live at the age of thirty, when she fled to Paris with her female lover. That was in 1921, a few years before she signed on as Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, taking the pseudonym Genêt. For half a century she described life on the Continent with matchless elegance.

The young journalist and reformer Horace Traubel visited Whitman nearly every day at his home in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman liked to talk, especially about the big issues, spiritual, political - all he'd learned over seven decades of peace and war. To mark the bicentenary of Walt Whitman's death, Carcanet presents Brenda Wineapple's distillation from these conversations with the great American poet.Whitman speaks from the heart, an old man who changed the course of American poetry and, by extension, the poetries of Europe, Asia, Latin America. Here, too, is the poet's worldly side - recalling the opprobrium heaped on Leaves of Grass for its poetic risks and sexual frankness; memories of Thoreau, Emerson and Lincoln; his judgments of Shakespeare, Goethe and Tolstoy; and his sense of the Nation.