biography

Softcover. Montpelier VT, Vermont State Division of the American Association of University Women, 2nd Ed., 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 84 pages, b&w illustrations. Related newspaper clipping laid in. Mild soil to wraps, otherwise a clean copy.

Middlebury VT, Paul S. Eriksson, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. SIGNED AND DATED BY THE AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. Introduction by Malcolm Cowley. A memoir of the sculptor by his older sister. 300 pages, b&w photos. Previous owner's inscription on lower front fly leaf. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 3rd pr., 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a nice dust jacket with light fading to spine, 216 pages. A view from behind the plate of baseball in the 50s, 60s,, and 70s. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 430 pages. During America's Swing Era, no musician was more successful or controversial than Artie Shaw: the charismatic and opinionated clarinetist-bandleader whose dozens of hits became anthems for "the greatest generation." But some of his most beautiful recordings were not issued until decades after he'd left the scene. He broke racial barriers by hiring African-American musicians. His frequent "retirements" earned him a reputation as the Hamlet of jazz. And he quit playing for good at the height of his powers. The handsome Shaw had seven wives (including Lana Turner and Ava Gardner). Inveterate reader and author of three books, he befriended the best-known writers of his time. Tom Nolan, who interviewed Shaw between 1990 and his death in 2004 and spoke with one hundred of his colleagues and contemporaries, captures Shaw and his era with candour and sympathy, bringing the master to vivid life and restoring him to his rightful place in jazz history. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 265 pages illustrated in b&w. From Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead and Nobody's Fool, comes Three Rocks, a biography of cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the iconic comic strip Nancy. But this graphic novel is about more than a single comic book artist. It is the story of this American art form, tracing its inception to 1895 with the Yellow Kid, the creation of Nancy in 1933, and all the strips that followed, including Peanuts and The Far Side. When Bushmiller died in 1982, Nancy was running in almost 900 daily newspapers--a number few syndicated cartoonists ever achieve. Nancy is hailed as the "perfect" comic strip by fans and cartoonists alike. The title Three Rocks refers to the trope of three hemispherical rocks often seen in a Bushmiller landscape--just enough to communicate environment to the reader. This distillation is exemplary of the iconic, diagrammatic look of Nancy, a comic strip about the nature of what it means to be a comic strip--the perfect avatar for Griffith to expand upon his philosophy of creating comics. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. US, North Point Press, 1st, 1998-05-01, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 376 pages, b&w photos. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. A memoir of her life in the 1930s and 1940s with photographer Edward Weston, by his wife at the time, and sometimes model, Charis Wilson. 86 photographs throughout. including many previously unpublished family pictures, photographs by friends, and many of Weston's own extraordinary images.

Hardcover. Cambridge, Mass., Charlotte C. Coates, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 250 pages. Ex-library stamp on title page. Ex-library residue and envelope on back endpaper. Otherwise, a very clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. Boston/London, Walker Books, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Haunting and deeply moving - a beautifully illustrated, fictionalized account of a formative time in the life of the teenage girl who wrote our most enduring horror story. Long before Mary Shelley published her Gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein, in 1818, at the age of nineteen, she shared fireside ghost tales at the home of family friends in Scotland. It was there that the headstrong girl - orphaned by her mother, spurned by her stepmother, and sent away by her father - spent two of her happiest teenage years. The brooding Scottish landscape and warm family atmosphere so influenced the author's life and art that some believe her famous novel took root there. To illuminate this period in Mary Shelley's life, Sharon Darrow skillfully spins fiction from fact. Her words are masterfully matched by Angela Barrett's exquisite, atmospheric, authentically detailed illustrations. The result is a rich tapestry of stories within stories - those told, those written, and more extraordinary, those lived. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Franklin Center PA, The Franklin Library, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in decorated red leather. This limited first edition has been signed by Arthur Miller exclusively for members of the The Signed First Edition Society. All edges gilt, marbled endpapers, sewn-in silk bookmarker. Clean, fresh and bright. His aurobiography. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller tells his life story with humor, passion, and candor. Beginning with his childhood and continuing through his life and career telling of both successes and failures. Miller gives colorful portraits of those people who touched his life, such as Marilyn Monroe, Orson Wells, Lucky Luciano, Clark Gable, Tennessee Williams, John F. Kennedy, Mikhail Gorbachev, and many more. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st pbk, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 296 pages, b&w illustrations. The apt subtitle of this award-winning biography, Photographer & Revolutionary, sums up the creative tensions that characterized Tina Modotti's life and brief photographic career. Active as a photographer for only nine years, Modotti was pulled between formal and social concerns. Producing striking modernist compositions of everyday objects, photojournalism of poverty and conflict, and portraits of celebrities and common people alike, Modotti balanced political concerns with formal rigor.First published in 1993 and long out of print, Tina Modotti: Photographer & Revolutionary is the definitive portrayal of Modotti's life and work. Few photographers are more deserving of a biographical treatment than Modotti, whose work as an actress and artist's model introduced her to Edward Weston, who was to become her lover. Soon after she arrived in Mexico City with Weston, Modotti became increasingly politicized, working for the communist newspaper El Machete and establishing herself as the go-to photographer for the Mexican Muralist movement. The book includes extensive archival material, interviews with Modotti's contemporaries and many rare photographs. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Titanic Thompson is the rollicking true story of one of the most charismatic characters in twentieth-century America. Travelling only with his golf clubs, a .45 revolver, and a suitcase full of cash, this is the legendary tale of a man who was married five times to five different girls, all teenagers on their wedding day. He killed five men, though he'd say 'they'd all agree they had it coming to them'. He won and lost millions in a time when being a millionaire still really meant something.Filled with fascinating facts and famous faces - Harry Houdini, Al Capone, Lee Trevino, Arnold Rothstein and Jean Harlow all make appearances - this is a brilliant and compelling snapshot of life on the road in freewheelin' America.

Hardcover. Boulder CO, Westview Press, 2nd pr., 1999, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 264 pages, color and b&w illustrations. This introduction to the life and works of one of the giants of Western painting also surveys the golden age of Venetian painting from Bellini to Veronese and its place in the history of Western art. Sometimes referred to as the founder of modern painting Titian's legacy and influence was immense and continuing?: Italian Baroque painting, El Greco, Rubens, Rembrandt and Dutch painting, French 18th century painting, Velazquez, and Picasso. There are 119 black and white illustrations integrated with the text and 8 plates in full color, a selected bibliography and index. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Dutton, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The mysterious true story of Connie Converse--a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition--and one writer's quest to understand her life This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life. When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse's voice on a recording, he was convinced she could not be real. Her recordings were too good not to know, and too out of place for the 1950s to make sense--a singer who seemed to bridge the gap between traditional Americana (country, blues, folk, jazz, and gospel), the Great American Songbook, and the singer-songwriter movement that exploded a decade later with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. And then there was the bizarre legend about Connie Converse that had become the prevailing narrative of her life: that in 1974, at the age of fifty, she simply drove off one day and was never heard from again. Could this have been true? Who was Connie Converse, really?

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket that's price-clipped. 434 pages, b&w illustrations. This is a full-scale biography of John Brown. "John Brown was a profoundly religious man dedicated to emancipation and Negro rights..." He "tried to overthrow slavery in the South itself by attacking Harpers Ferry and inciting a slave insurrection."Was Brown a vicious fanatic, or the greatest abolitionist hero in history?" This history is based on "contemporary letters, diaries, journals, newspapers, published reports, and recollections of eyewitnesses, this book is especially notable for providing the first really full account ever written of Brown's career before he went to Kansas..." Bold presentation inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. London, Phaidon Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Near Fine, Hardcover, photographs and afterword by Ferdinando Scianna. 124 pages; full-page duo-toned b&w plates throughout; 10 x 12.5 inches. Biography, bibliography. Since he began taking photographs in the 1960s, journalist and Magnum photographer Ferdinando Scianna has been fascinated by the sight of sleepers. Over four decades Scianna has captured thousands of images of people and animals sleeping in the countryside, in cities, in deserts, on street corners, in moving trains, and in their own homes.

Hardcover. Northampton MA, Kraushar Press, 1st, 1943, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, orange cloth covers with black lettering, 163 pages, b&w photos. Inspired by a visit to Stoney Reservation in Alberta, Canada, the author spent 15 years visiting & living among 47 tribes, and developed a touring show of pictures, songs, dances, stories & sign language. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. South Windsor, CT, Barney E. Daley, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 300+ pages. Hardcover. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR. Bound in green cloth; gilt lettering & design on spine and front cover. From the introduction (Evan Lawn): "Whether one reads straight through or reads here and there in a checkered fashion, every reader will enjoy meeting Barney. ...And if the reader happens to be an historian, these memoirs will be prized as a treasure trove of living information about rural, daily life before electricity and indoor plumbing."

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1979, Hardcover in a nice dust jacket with mild fading to spine, 347 pages. This work is the autobiography of Arai Hakuseki, the celebrated Confucian scholar who holds a prominent position in Japanese history as the influential adviser to Shogun Tokugawa Ienobu and his successor Ietsugu. Hakuseki's administrative reforms, his voluminous writings, and his advice on a multitude of topics--coinage, foreign trade, taxation, diplomatic protocol, justice, the samurai code and benevolent government, for example. governed most of the policies implemented during Ienobu's rule and influenced many of those of his successors. The book contains notes, biographical notes, appendices, a chronology, maps, and an index. Name on front flyleaf, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Crown, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 644 pages, b&w illustrations. After a protracted squabble over private papers with the playwright's estate, Leverich delivers this hefty first volume of a projected two-volume life of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). In it, Leverich, who produced several of Williams's plays and calls himself Williams's "chosen biographer", covers the years through 1945, when The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. Treated are Williams's youth in Mississippi and St. Louis; the college years at the universities of Missouri and Iowa; bumming around (but always writing) in New Orleans and Greenwich Village; the disaster of his first Broadway play (it closed in Boston); script writing, or avoiding it, at MGM's Hollywood mill; and, finally, the evolution of Menagerie, a wonderfully detailed and dramatic case history in itself. Leverich's overworked conceit, which he restates at intervals, is that this is the life of Tom Williams, a "repressed puritan" poet, who in time created a more flamboyant public persona called Tennessee. A few matters are set straight. Leverich maintains his subject's active homosexual life started in his late 20s, later than Williams stated in his memoirs, and that his sister's infamous lobotomy came later than his mother claimed. Although the accumulation of information is impressive, the lower Leverich keeps his own profile and editorial commentary the better his book is, which means it is at its best when it simply reproduces Williams's sporadically kept journal. If you believe that all the details of a life are but preparation for a single event, in this case, the opening of a remarkable play, this is an impressively argued biography.

NY, G.P. Putnams, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Over 200 Illustrations, 218 pages includes a bibliography of the writer and illustrator's book

Hardcover. NY, G.P. Putnams, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Over 200 Illustrations, 218 pages includes a bibliography of the writer and illustrator's book bibliography. Previous owner's inscription on the front fly leaf, wrinkle to front flap of dj, otherwise bright and clean.

Hardcover. NY, William Morrow, 3rd pr., 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 352 pages, b&w photos. The Autobiography pulls no punches: Curtis debunks myths of stardom and glamour with a raw, uncensored, street-honed New York bite. The scope of his memoirs includes: rooming with Marlon Brando in Hollywood in the late forties; a glamorous marraige to Janet Leigh in 1951, and the extraordianry days during his first flush of success.a fully detailed description of his descent into alcohol and cocaine addiction in the 1970s and 1980s; and his therapeutic, ongoing work as a visual artist. Clean, bright copy in a similar dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Rizzoli, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 304 pages, illustrated in color and b&w throughout. Spotless and tight copy. American architect Morris Lapidus is best known as the designer of glamorous postwar resort hotels in Florida, such as the Fontainebleau (1954) and the Eden Roc (1955) in Miami Beach, and the Americana in Bal Harbour (1956). Yet in a remarkable sixty-year career that began in 1926, he designed more than 500 retail stores, hotels, apartment complexes, and stage sets that captured the popular spirit and changing face of Main Street America in the twentieth century.

Hardcover. NY, Meredith Press, 2nd pr., 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 214 pages, b&w photos. INSCRIBED on half title as follows " ___________, I hope you enjoy the book as much as I did living it" and signed Toots. Tight binding text unmarked, closed tears repaired internally to back panel of jacket.