As movie patrons sat in darkened theaters in January 1914, they were mesmerized by an alluring temptress with long sable hair and kohl-rimmed eyes. Theda Bara--"the vamp," as she would come to be known--would soon be one of the highest paid film stars of the 1910s, earning an unheard of $4,000 per week, before retiring from the screen in 1926. In 1946, at age five, the author met Bara--then 61--at her Beverly Hills home and the actress became her mentor. This memoir is the story of their friendship.

Despite being a mediocre actress with less than classic beauty, Theda Bara was one of Hollywood's leading performers in the early years of cinema. Her success was mostly due to Fox Studio's publicity: they made her a screen vamp and used her to titillate the public. And Theda Bara, ambitious and nearing 30 when she made her first film, enthusiastically played the role. In real life, Theodosia Goodman bore little resemblance to the vampish Theda Bara character. But the studio-created persona, with the invented name, evil personality and fictional history, was a major star. Though her films were often trite, poorly acted, extravagant and crude, the public packed movie houses. But her film career ended once the public tired of the persona. Through contemporary newspaper accounts, film reviews, interviews and other sources, this is a comprehensive account of the life and times of one of Hollywood's first female stars.

Although a major star in the 1910s, Theda Bara--known as "The Vamp"--was largely neglected until the 1990s, when her fame began to resurface. Since then, there have been biographies, documentaries and other works that have brought the silent film actress back into the spotlight, including a painstaking stills reconstruction of her lost epic Cleopatra. This is a complete examination of Bara's more than 40 films, as well as her theater and radio appearances, down to the smallest detail. With the vast majority of Bara's films considered lost, it is a particularly valuable resource for fans and scholars, and includes information about each film's genesis, director, plot, censorship problems, and critical and public reactions. Also included is a biographical overview, with many illuminating anecdotes.

In Secularising the Sacred, Mishory offers an account of Zionist Israeli artists-designers' visual corpus and artistic lexicon of Jewish-Israeli icons as an anchor for the emerging “civil religion,” through a process of giving visual form to Zionist ideas and myths.

Theda Bars's remarkable life as told by Eve Golden's heartfelt account is short of discovering a means of traveling through time and as close as we are ever likely to get to meeting the screen's great Vamp!

Mae Murray (1885--1965), popularly known as "the girl with the bee-stung lips," was a fiery presence in silent-era Hollywood. Renowned for her classic beauty and charismatic presence, she rocketed to stardom as a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, moving across the country to star in her first film, To Have and to Hold, in 1916. An instant hit with audiences, Murray soon became one of the most famous names in Tinseltown. However, Murray's moment in the spotlight was fleeting. The introduction of talkies, a string of failed marriages, a serious career blunder, and a number of bitter legal battles left the former star in a state of poverty and mental instability that she would never overcome. In this intriguing biography, Michael G. Ankerich traces Murray's career from the footlights of Broadway to the klieg lights of Hollywood, recounting her impressive body of work on the stage and screen and charting her rapid ascent to fame and decline into obscurity. Featuring exclusive interviews with Murray's only son, Daniel, and with actor George Hamilton, whom the actress closely befriended at the end of her life, Ankerich restores this important figure in early film to the limelight.

In this unique work, Henry Miller gives an utterly candid and self-revealing account of the reading he did during his formative years.

This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles. Sara Crosby locates the origins of this metamorphosis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harriet Beecher Stowe applied an alternative medical discourse to revise the poisonous Cassy into a doctor. The newly “medicalized” poisoner then served as a focal point for two competing narratives that envisioned the American nation as a multi-racial, egalitarian democracy or as a white and male supremacist ethno-state. Crosby tracks this battle from the heroic healers created by Stowe, Mary Webb, Oscar Micheaux, and Louisia May Alcott to the even more monstrous poisoners or “vampires” imagined by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theda Bara, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D. W. Griffith.

In recent years horror and gothic themes have penetrated mainstream popular culture in a manner unseen since the horror boom of the 1970s. Primetime television viewers who before might not have shown interest in such late-night fare now happily settle down after dinner to watch zombie or serial killer shows. This collection of 54 biographical essays examines many overlooked and underrated figures who have played a role in the ever expanding world of horror and gothic entertainment. The contributors push the boundaries of how we define these terms, bringing into the discussion such diverse figures as singer-songwriter Tom Waits, occultist Dion Fortune, author Charles Beaumont, historian and bishop Gregory of Tours and video game designer Shinji Mikami.