Why do so many people care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? What are the privileges and pleasures of fandom? Do celebrities ever deserve the outsized attention they receive? In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, to shape the stories we tell about celebrities and fans. The result: a high-stakes drama as endless as it is unpredictable. Drawing on scrapbooks, personal diaries, and vintage fan mail, Marcus traces celebrity culture back to its nineteenth-century roots, when people the world over found themselves captivated by celebrity chefs, bad-boy poets, and actors such as the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), as famous in her day as the Beatles in theirs. Known in her youth for sleeping in a coffin, hailed in maturity as a woman of genius, Bernhardt became a global superstar thanks to savvy engagement with her era's most innovative media and technologies: the popular press, commercial photography, and speedy new forms of travel. Whether you love celebrity culture or hate it, The Drama of Celebrity will change how you think about one of the most important phenomena of modern times.

Carrying All Before Her recovers the stories of six eighteenth-century celebrity actresses who performed during pregnancy, melding public and private, persona and person, domestic and professional labor and helping to shape wider social, medical, and political conversations about gender, sexuality, pregnancy, and motherhood. Their stories deepen our understanding of celebrity, repertory, and theatre's connection to a wider social world, and challenge notions of women's agency and power in and beyond the professional theatre.

Vanity Fair's veteran special correspondent pulls back the curtain on the world of celebrity and those who live and die there Vanity Fair's Maureen Orth always makes news. From Hollywood to murder trials to the corridors of politics, this National Magazine Award winner covers lives led in public, on camera, in the headlines. Here she takes us close-up into the world of fame--bridging entertainment, politics, and news--and the lives of those who understand the chemistry, the very DNA, of fame and how to create it, manipulate it, sustain it. Moving from former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to Michael Jackson, the ultimate child/monster of show business, Orth describes our evolution from a society where talent attracted attention to a place where the star-making machinery of the "celebrity-industrial complex" shapes, reshapes, and sells its gods (and monsters) to the public. From divas letting their hair down (Tina Turner) to Little Gods (Woody Allen and Princess Diana's almost father-in-law Mohammed Fayed), political theater (Arnold's Hollywood hubris, Arianna Huffington's guru-guided gubernatorial quest), news-gone-soap-opera (I Love Laci), and even the Queen Mother of reinvention (Madonna as dominatrix/children's-book author), Orth delivers a portrait of an era. The Importance of Being Famous shows us the real world of the big room where the rules that govern mere mortals don't matter--and anonymity is a crime.

A free preview collection of essays from Tom Payne, author of FAME We may regard celebrities as deities, but that does not mean we worship them with deference. From prehistory to the present, humanity has possessed a primal urge first to exalt the famous but then to cut them down (Michael Jackson, anyone?). Why do we treat the ones we love like burnt offerings in a ritual of human sacrifice? Perhaps because that is exactly what they are. In this collection of essays, Tom Payne -- of the website Popcropolis and the "trenchant, unsettling, and darkly hilarious" Fame (New York Times Book Review) -- draws the narratives of the past and the immediate present into one intriguing story. INCLUDES AN EXCERPT FROM FAME!

New York Times Bestseller: Three former friends bound by ambition, fame, and a dark secret reunite in this spellbinding saga from the author of Blood and Money. They were the princes of their high school in Fort Worth, Texas. Valedictorian Kleber Cantrell became a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who befriended the famous and exposed the notorious. Mack Crawford, teenage Adonis and University of Texas football hero, used his good looks to jumpstart an acting career. And T.J. Luther, voted “most popular” by the senior class, fell into a lurid life of crime but found God in prison and reinvented himself as the nation’s leading right-wing televangelist, his message of faith masking an all-consuming desire for power and revenge. The different routes Kleber, Mack, and T.J. took to celebrity share common signposts: personal upheavals, ruinous marriages, petty jealousies, and blind ambition. Now, on the eve of their twenty-fifth high school reunion, their separate paths will cross to devastating effect—because these three friends have something else in common. It happened in an isolated cabin in the Texas woods on the night they graduated. They vowed never to speak of it again, but they always knew there would be a terrible price to pay . . . A unique blend of fiction and autobiography, Celebrity is an “enthralling” tale of suspense from an Edgar Award–winning author whose journalism career gave him a front-row seat to the tumultuous lives of the rich and famous (TheBoston Globe). A six-month national bestseller, it was the basis for a television miniseries starring Ned Beatty, Hal Holbrook, and James Whitmore

Madison Myers is a hard working assistant to one of LA's top talent agents. Determined to make a respectable name for herself in the business, the last thing she wants in her life is singing sensation Walker Rhodes, with his non-stop tabloid filled antics and bad boy behavior. But after he pulls her onstage during one of his concerts and serenades her in front of thousands of screaming fans, all bets are off. She doesn't want to give in to his charms, but Walker is relentless... and keeping a secret of his own. A secret that changes everything between them. Come fall in love with Walker & Madison in Seeing Stars.

Two journalists describe their whirlwind efforts to become famous in two weeks by getting their names and faces in magazines, newspapers, and on television.

The Hollywood Connection: The Influence of Fictional Media and Celebrity Politics on American Public Opinion is one of the first edited volumes offered in the political science discipline on the effects of fictional media and celebrity on public opinion, and synthesizes many niche areas of research into single text. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of acknowledging a shift in academic focus away from the lateral interactions between celebrities and politicians (and in some cases celebrities becoming politicians) toward research that engages the American audience, as consumers of media, as a critical political component. The volume offers a collection of diverse research on questions treating the effects of fictional media on consumer audiences and the larger implications for American politics. This research collection offers both qualitative and quantitative data sources and showcases a variety of methodological approaches (experimental design, public opinion survey analysis, content analysis, etc.), robust theoretical applications, and encompasses a variety of conduits, ranging from television sitcoms to horror films to the action drama 24, that make it both compelling and timely.

The first comprehensive survey of celebrity in the contemporary media.

The historical and cultural context of fame in the twenty-first century Today, celebrity culture is an inescapable part of our media landscape and our everyday lives. This was not always the case. Over the past century, media technologies have increasingly expanded the production and proliferation of fame. Celebrity explores this revolution and its often under-estimated impact on American culture. Using numerous precedent-setting examples spanning more than one hundred years of media history, Douglas and McDonnell trace the dynamic relationship between celebrity and the technologies of mass communication that have shaped the nature of fame in the United States. Revealing how televised music fanned a worldwide phenomenon called “Beatlemania” and how Kim Kardashian broke the internet, Douglas and McDonnell also show how the media has shaped both the lives of the famous and the nature of the spotlight itself. Celebrity examines the production, circulation, and effects of celebrity culture to consider the impact of stars from Shirley Temple to Muhammad Ali to the homegrown star made possible by your Instagram feed. It maps ever-evolving media technologies as they adeptly interweave the lives of the rich and famous into ours: from newspapers and photography in the nineteenth century, to the twentieth century’s radio, cinema, and television, up to the revolutionary impact of the internet and social media. Today, mass media relies upon an ever-changing cast of celebrities to grab our attention and money, and new stars are conquering new platforms to build their adoring audiences and enhance their images. In the era of YouTube, Snapchat, and reality television, fame may be fleeting, but its impact on society is profound and lasting.