Sydney Ladensohn Stern – författare

Winner of the 2020 Peter C. Rollins Book AwardLonglisted for the 2020 Moving Image Book Award by the Kraszna-Krausz FoundationNamed a 2019 Richard Wall Memorial Award Finalist by the Theatre Library AssociationHerman J. (1897–1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture’s only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture.Despite triumphs as diverse as Monkey Business and Cleopatra, and Pride of the Yankees and Guys and Dolls, the witty, intellectual brothers spent their Hollywood years deeply discontented and yearning for what they did not have—a career in New York theater. Herman, formerly an Algonquin Round Table habitué, New York Times and New Yorker theater critic, and playwright-collaborator with George S. Kaufman, never reconciled himself to screenwriting. He gambled away his prodigious earnings, was fired from all the major studios, and drank himself to death at fifty-five. While Herman drifted downward, Joe rose to become a critical and financial success as a writer, producer, and director, though his constant philandering with prominent stars like Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Gene Tierney distressed his emotionally fragile wife who eventually committed suicide. He wrecked his own health using uppers and downers in order to direct Cleopatra by day and finish writing it at night, only to be very publicly fired by Darryl F. Zanuck, an experience from which Joe never fully recovered.For this first dual portrait of the Mankiewicz brothers, Sydney Ladensohn Stern draws on interviews, letters, diaries, and other documents still in private hands to provide a uniquely intimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the lives, loves, work, and relationship between these complex men.

Includes a new afterword: A “richly detailed” biography of the iconic feminist based on interviews with friends, family, colleagues, and Steinem herself (The Washington Post). Going beyond Gloria Steinem’s public persona, this biography provides an in-depth portrait of the famed activist—covering her family of origin, Smith College education, travels in India, founding of Ms. magazine, and much more—drawn from fifty hours of interviews with Steinem, as well as conversations with more than two hundred people in her life. “Stern’s biography is sympathetic but critical about the woman who was once perhaps the foremost figure of American feminism. . . . Follows its subject from her childhood with a mentally ill mother and ne’er-do-well father through her rise in the women’s movement.” —The New York Times Book Review “Feminist icon, goddess, social climber, bunny—who is Gloria Steinem? All of the above, according to [this] serious new biography. . . . A real look at Steinem off the public platform.” —Kirkus Reviews “Avoiding esoteric psychological or feminist theorizing, Stern still provides a clear context for Steinem’s development both as a public figure and as an exemplar of the movement that seeks to have women define themselves as autonomous individuals.” —Library JournalIncludes photographs