American Rhapsody Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building [Paperback]

The stories of Americas most extraordinary strivers and their failures and triumphs

Ranging from the shattered gentility of Edith Whartons heroines to racial confrontation in the songs of Nina Simone,American Rhapsodypresents 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 link them in surprising ways. It isnt far from Whartons brave new women to F. Scott Fitzgeralds giddy flappers, and on to the big-screen command of Katharine Hepburn and the dangerous dames of Dashiell Hammetts hard-boiled world. The improvisatory jazziness of George GershwinsRhapsody in Bluehas 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 Williamss blackface performances to James Baldwins warning of the fire next time, however slow and bitter and anguished this progress may be.

American Rhapsodyoffers 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.

An ingenious and captivating way to spotlight the kaleidoscopic rhapsody of Americas spirit. Amy Henderson,The Washington Post

Stunningly evocative & Pierpont writes with sensitivity and erudition  and always in dazzling prose & American Rhapsody is compulsively readable and fascinatingly informative. Learning this much has almost never been so much fun. Kevin O'Kelly,Christian Science Monitor

A kaleidoscopic mural ol3+