Synopses & Reviews
One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker magazine has met this challenge more often and more successfully--and more originally and more surprisingly--than any other modern American journal.
Starting with its light fantastic evocations of the glamorous and the idiosyncratic in the twenties and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Richard Pryor, The New Yorker's Profiles have presented readers with a vast and brilliant portrait gallery of our day and age. These literary-journalistic investigations into character and accomplishment, motive and madness, beauty and ugliness, are unrivaled in their range, variety of style, and embrace of humanity.
To help mark the occasion of The New Yorker's seventy-fifth anniversary, Life Stories puts into one volume, for the first time, some of the most outstanding examples of this exemplary tradition. Here you will find Wolcott Gibbs on Henry Luce, Lillian Ross on Ernest Hemingway, and Susan Orlean on show dog Biff Truesdale. And in some of the exhibit's many other rooms you will find startling likenesses of Marlon Brando by Truman Capote, magician Ricky Jay by Mark Singer, pitcher Steve Blass by Roger Angell, and Anatole Broyard by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
When they were first published in the magazine, these essential biographies brought insight, amusement, understanding, and, often, joy or sorrow to those who read them. Gathered together here, in Life Stories, they provide us with an album of our era, a rich and diverse appraisal of some of the most prominent members ofan entire century's cast.
Synopsis
With profiles of significant individuals, "Life Stories" is an exploration of high-fliers and low-lifers who have helped define the character of the 20th century--published for "The New Yorker's" 75th anniversary.
Synopsis
A dazzling collection of biographical profiles of some of the most important and most captivating figures of the century, written by our greatest writers -- brought together in honor of The New Yorker's 75th anniversary.
In its 75 successful years, The New Yorker has set the standard for feature-length magazine biography. In fact, the magazine owns a copyright to the title Profiles. No other periodical has brought to this kind of biographical reporting more distinguished writers or more wide-ranging subjects, and none has achieved more incisive and revealing results.
The compilation includes telling, subtle, and often funny portraits of figures that come from every field of human endeavor and accomplishment: Ernest Hemingway, Legs Diamond, Thomas Edison, Roseanne Bart, Queen Mary, Julia Child, Marlon Brando, Adolf Hitler, Benjamin Cardozo, Edith Warton and Hillary Clinton. The contributors' names also speak for themselves: Ian Frazier, Janet Flanner, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, Mark Singer, Dorothy Parker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Truman Capote.
Profiles are the jewel in The New Yorker's nonfiction crown. They not only display the riches of a great magazine, but shed light on many of the great figures who have helped to shape the world we live in.
About the Author
DAVID REMNICK is the editor of The New Yorker. He began his career as a sportswriter for The Washington Post and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Lenin's Tomb. He is also the author of Resurrection and The Devil Problem and Other True Stories, a collection of essays. He lives in New York City with his wife and three children.
Table of Contents
Mr. Hunter's grave (George F. Hunter) /Joseph Mitchell --Secrets of the magus (Ricky Jay) /Mark Singer --Isadora (Isadora Duncan) /Janet Flanner --The soloist (Mikhail Baryshnikov) /Joan Acocella --Time, fortune, life, Luce (Henry Robinson Luce) /Wolcott Gibbs --Nobody better, better than nobody (Heloise) /Ian Frazier --The mountains of pi (the Chudnovsky brothers) /Richard Preston --Covering the cops (Edna Buchanan) /Calvin Trillin --Travels in Georgia (Carol Ruckdeschel) /John McPhee --The man who walks on air (Philippe Petit) /Calvin Tomkins --A house on Gramercy Park (Benjamin Sonnenberg) /Geoffrey Hellman --How do you like it now, gentlemen? (Ernest Hemingway) /Lillian Ross --the education of a prince (Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff) /Alva Johnston --White like me (Anatole Broyard) /Henry Louis Gates, Jr. --Wunderkind (Floyd Patterson) /A.J. Liebling --Fifteen years of the salto mortale (Johnny Carson) /Kenneth Tynan --The duke in his domain (Marlon Brando) /Truman Capote --A Pryor love (Richard Pryor) /Hilton Als --Gone for good (Steve Blass) /Roger Angell --Lady with a pencil (Katharine White) /Nancy Franklin --Dealing with Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) /John Lahr --The coolhunt (Baysie Wightman and DeeDee Gordon) /Malcolm Gladwell --Man goes to see a doctor (Max Grosskurth) /Adam Gopnik --Show dog (Biff Truesdale) /Susan Orlean --Forty-one false starts (David Salle) /Janet Malcolm.