When Katherine Anne Porter left her home state of Texas for New York, she brought with her the hard edge of a Western pioneer. Passionate and intelligent, it was this edge more than anything that made her name as a writer. Despite her self-imposed exile ...
She became a writer at a time when writers were celebrities and their recklessness was admirable. Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Hammett, Lillian Hellman was a smoker, a drinker, a lover, and a fighter. Hellman maintained a social and political life as large and restless ...
by J. Michael Lennon, Professor of English, Wilkes University Among our major living writers, Norman Mailer is perhaps the most well-known, both in the United States and internationally. No career in our literature has been at once so brilliant, varied, controversial, public, prolific and misunderstood. ...
American Masters' "Norman Mailer: Mailer on Mailer" is a co-production with Reciprocal Films and Films d'Ici in France. The program was originally produced for French television as three, one-hour programs and broadcast on successive nights. Below is a discussion between Tamar Hacker, Sr. Producer for ...
One of the most outspoken and controversial writers of the 20th century, Norman Mailer's unrelenting quest for truth and meaning found him both fame and infamy. His novels, such as "The Naked and the Dead", "The Executioner's Song", are potent with both wise adages and ...
"I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the boxhouse hills and cry. Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, ...
More than an actor (and Academy Award winner), Sidney Poitier is an artist. A writer and director, a thinker and critic, a humanitarian and diplomat, his presence as a cultural icon has long been one of protest and humanity. His career defined and documented the ...
Lee Grant, Director of AMERICAN MASTERS SIDNEY POITIER: ONE BRIGHT LIGHT, acted with Poitier at the pinnacle of his popularity, in 1969's groundbreaking film IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT. Grant: "The performances in IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT went way beyond the screenplay. ...
He was brilliant and prolific, breathing life and passion into such memorable characters as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in his critically acclaimed A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. And like them, he was troubled and self-destructive, an abuser of alcohol and drugs. He was awarded four ...
Robert Sherwood, reviewing cowboy hero Tom Mix: "They say he rides as if he’s part of the horse, but they don’t say which part." Dorothy Parker: "That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them." George S. Kaufman: Once when asked ...
