A favorite locale of such film pioneers as D. W. Griffith and Mary Pickford, the historic borough of Fort Lee was the first center of the American motion picture industry. Studios lined both sides of Main Street, and enormous film laboratories fed the nickelodeon market with thousands of reels of comedies and cliffhangers. Broadway stars and producers came here to make many of their first feature-length films; but by the 1920s, Theda Bara, Fatty Arbuckle, and Douglas Fairbanks were gone. Yet even after the studios closed down, the film industry was still the backbone of the local economy, with hundreds working behind the scenes in the printing, storage, and distribution of movies being made in Hollywood.

During the 1910s, motion pictures came to dominate every aspect of life in the suburban New Jersey community of Fort Lee. During the nickelodeon era, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Mack Sennett would ferry entire acting companies across the Hudson to pose against the Palisades. Theda Bara, "Fatty" Arbuckle, and Douglas Fairbanks worked in the rows of great greenhouse studios that sprang up in Fort Lee and the neighboring communities. Tax revenues from studios and laboratories swelled municipal coffers. Then, suddenly, everything changed. Fort Lee, the film town once hailed as the birthplace of the American motion picture industry, was now the industry's official ghost town. Stages once filled to capacity by Paramount and Universal were leased by independent producers or used as paint shops by scenic artists from Broadway. Most of Fort Lee's film history eventually burned away, one studio at a time. Richard Koszarski re-creates the rise and fall of Fort Lee filmmaking in a remarkable collage of period news accounts, memoirs, municipal records, previously unpublished memos and correspondence, and dozens of rare posters and photographs—not just film history, but a unique account of what happened to one New Jersey town hopelessly enthralled by the movies. Distributed for John Libbey Publishing

Fort Lee sits on the Palisades, high above the Hudson River, across from Manhattan at the western end of the George Washington Bridge. Fort Lee recounts the rich history of this dynamic borough. Indeed, George Washington slept here, and the Barrymores and the Bennetts and a multitude of actors and entertainers lived and worked here, as it was home to the motion picture industry in the early 1900s. It was also the site of the world-famous Palisades Amusement Park.

From 1920's Speakeasy to mid-century haunt of the famous and infamous, discover the tantalizing history of a legendary New Jersey Nightclub. Where did Frank Sinatra, Mickey Mantle, Sugar Ray Robinson, Joan Crawford and hundreds of other A-listers along with mobsters like Meyer Lansky eat, drink and dance? It wasn't in Hollywood or at the Copacabana but at Bill Miller's Riviera in Fort Lee. The Riviera's breathtaking views of New York, its stunning showgirls and its gambling hall drew the famous and infamous to its tables. After it was originally run as a speakeasy by Ben Marden during the 1920s, Bill Miller, a Russian Jewish immigrant, attracted the most sought-after performers and turned it into one of the most popular nightclubs during the 1940s and 1950s. Relive Bill Miller's Riviera and experience the excitement of his lucky patrons.

Fort Lee, located adjacent to the Petersburg Civil War Battlefield, is the designated Home of the United States Army Quartermaster Corps. The first Camp Lee, established as a National Army Cantonment in 1917, trained the 80th Division for service in France. In 1940, Camp Lee was reestablished, and since World War II, has trained hundreds of thousands of Quartermasters, whose numerous skills include military supply, water and petroleum operations, Army field feeding, and parachute rigging for "supply by sky." Fort Lee is also the home of the Defense Commissary Agency and the Army Logistics Management College, which provides advanced schooling for Armed Forces logisticians. For over 60 years, Fort Lee has played a vital role ensuring that America's Army is the best-equipped and most well-supported army in the world.

The mob offers the young mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, a $500,000 bribe to rezone land adjacent to the George Washington Bridge. Risking his life, the mayor pretends to go along with the plan but wears a wire. His efforts lead to the convictions of seven people.

A fresh (in more than one sense) and honest new voice in fiction is extravagantly displayed in this first novel that candidly dissects modern romance. Plagued with weird parents, an underdeveloped body, and a mind on the verge of self-deconstruction, Phoebe Fine feels ill-equipped for a journey through the hardening chambers of the late twentieth-century heart. But from fifth grade and Roger Mancuso, equal parts baby Brando and court jester, through her early adult life with New Media executive Neil Schmertz, a babytalker who prefers spooning to sex, Phoebe trudges defiantly through guyland, armed with a tart tongue, and propelled by an insatiable desire to be loved.

Aware that some may see the title of this volume as an oxymoron, James Ward Lee argues in his "Argumentative Introduction" that for more than a century Fort Worth writers have written well about a city too often dismissed as a semi-rural cow town. Writers have celebrated its world of cattle and oil, to be sure, but many have seen other sides of Fort Worth--the country club set, the literati, the artists and artisans, the musicians, the intellectuals, and the whole minority sub-culture that has given a cosmopolitan tone to the Queen City of the Prairies. Fort Worth is in many ways the most typical of Texas cities--proud of its slogan of "Cowtown and Culture." People mingle as easily at the new Bass Hall, with its world-class visiting entertainers and the Van Cliburn Piano Competition, as they do at the White Elephant Saloon or the Cowtown Coliseum. They visit a museum complex unrivalled anywhere in the world for a city Fort Worth's size, and they attend the Southwest Exposition and Livestock Show. Lee and Judy Alter, both Fort Worth residents and well-known writers themselves, found passages in novels, short stories, and poetry that caught the city's atmosphere and odd bits of its history. And they found that some of the best writing done about Cowtown is journalistic rather than what is usually considered literary. There are articles by current and former members of the staff of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and one particularly poignant piece about the last day of the old Fort Worth Press. Literary Fort Worth is a literary smorgasbord, with something to appeal to almost any reader's taste. And literary? You bet!