An important and prolific playwright, Philip Barry wrote hit plays such as The Philadelphia Story and Holiday. However, he has been largely forgotten and no book-length analysis of his work has appeared in more than forty years. With this book, Donald R. Anderson rescues the playwright from obscurity. Although Barry’s successes were with comedies of manners, he also wrote dramatic and experimental works. Anderson analyzes all of Barry’s plays (twenty-one in total) and questions the traditional characterization of the American playwright’s work. He begins with Barry’s early plays concerning intergenerational tensions and lessons learned from the Great War. Subsequent chapters explore Barry’s preoccupation with fidelity and infidelity, his struggles with his Catholic beliefs, and his investigations into sources of evil and despair. Anderson also looks at the plays of the late 1930s and the 1940s, including the posthumously produced Second Threshold. One chapter is devoted to Barry’s synergistic relationship with Katharine Hepburn: her role in lifting the playwright out of a mid-1930s slump and his role in rescuing her from the label of “box-office poison” with both The Philadelphia Story and the World War II drama Without Love. Anderson places Barry within the context of his times but also shows him drawing on past influences and anticipating theatrical developments of the latter part of the twentieth century. Part cultural history, part literary analysis, Shadowed Cocktails is sure to revitalize interest in this remarkable American author. and his role in rescuing her from the label of 'box-office poison' with both The Philadelphia Story and the World War II drama Without Love.

In June 1919, the Algonquin Hotel became the site of the daily meetings of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of journalists, authors, publicists and actors who gathered to exchange bon mots over lunch in the main dining room. The group met almost daily for the better part of ten years. Some of the core members of the “Vicious Circle” included Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Jane Grant, Ruth Hale, George S. Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Neysa McMein, Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, Robert E. Sherwood and Alexander Woollcott. George S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun, and Edna Ferber, who influenced writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, were also a part of the August assembly, and as founders of The New Yorker magazine, all hotel guests receive free copies to this day. Frank Case, owner of the Algonquin Hotel from 1907 until his death in 1946, ensured a daily luncheon for the talented group of young writers by treating them to free celery and popovers, and they were provided with their own table and waiter. All members were affiliated with the Algonquin Round Table, although they referred to themselves as the Vicious Circle. In this memoir, first published in 1951, Frank Case’s daughter Margaret Case Harriman recounts the diverting history of what was an innocent lunch group at her father’s hotel and illustrates how it grew to become an important factor in literature, the theatre, and American wit and humor... “A lively, chatty, entertaining work, touched with nostalgia.”—Chicago Sunday Tribune “Mrs. Harriman brings vividly to mind and to memory some of the most vivid people who ever sat around a table...She writes with enthusiasm and charm.”—New York Herald Tribune Book Review “Phenomenal...Congrats, as Connolly says, from the Bunch.”—Franklin P. Adams “A lovingly observed and brilliantly written chronicle of an era that didn’t know it was one.”—Deems Taylo

A Dangerous Woman is Susan Ronald's revealing biography of Florence Gould, fabulously wealthy socialite and patron of the arts, who hid a dark past as a Nazi collaborator in 1940’s Paris. Born in turn-of-the-century San Francisco to French parents, Florence moved to Paris at the age of eleven. Believing that only money brought respectability and happiness, she became the third wife of Frank Jay Gould, son of the railway millionaire Jay Gould. She guided Frank’s millions into hotels and casinos, creating a luxury hotel and casino empire. She entertained Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Kennedy, and many Hollywood stars—like Charlie Chaplin, who became her lover. While the party ended for most Americans after the Crash of 1929, Frank and Florence stayed on, fearing retribution by the IRS. During the Occupation, Florence took several German lovers and hosted a controversial Nazi salon. As the Allies closed in, the unscrupulous Florence became embroiled in a notorious money laundering operation for Hermann Göring’s Aerobank. Yet after the war, not only did she avoid prosecution, but her vast fortune bought her respectability as a significant contributor to the Metropolitan Museum and New York University, among many others. It also earned her friends like Estée Lauder who obligingly looked the other way. A seductive and utterly amoral woman who loved to say “money doesn’t care who owns it,” Florence’s life proved a strong argument that perhaps money can buy happiness after all.

New York Times Bestseller: “A marvelously readable biography” of the couple and their relationships with Picasso, Fitzgerald, and other icons of the era (The New York Times Book Review). Wealthy Americans with homes in Paris and on the French Riviera, Gerald and Sara Murphy were at the very center of expatriate cultural and social life during the modernist ferment of the 1920s. Gerald Murphy—witty, urbane, and elusive—was a giver of magical parties and an acclaimed painter. Sara Murphy, an enigmatic beauty who wore her pearls to the beach, enthralled and inspired Pablo Picasso (he painted her both clothed and nude), Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The models for Nicole and Dick Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, the Murphys also counted among their friends John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Fernand Léger, Archibald MacLeish, Cole Porter, and a host of others. Far more than mere patrons, they were kindred spirits whose sustaining friendship released creative energy. Yet none of the artists who used the Murphys for their models fully captured the real story of their lives: their Edith Wharton childhoods, their unexpected youthful romance, their ten-year secret courtship, their complex and enduring marriage—and the tragedy that struck them, when the world they had created seemed most perfect. Drawing on a wealth of family diaries, photographs, letters and other papers, as well as on archival research and interviews on two continents, this “brilliantly rendered biography” documents the pivotal role of the Murphys in the story of the Lost Generation (Los Angeles Times). “Often considered minor Lost Generation celebrities, the Murphys were in fact much more than legendary party givers. Vaill’s compelling biography unveils their role in the European avant-garde movement of the 1920s; Gerald was a serious modernist painter. But Vaill also shows how their genius for friendship and for transforming daily life into art attracted the most creative minds of the time.” —Library Journal

A tribute to a man whose life's work has centered on the study of authorship and who is a scholar and book collector of the first magnitude, The Professions of Authorship examines the business of writing, publishing, and selling books - or what George V. Higgins describes in this volume as a "perplexing, disorganized, chameleonic enterprise". Twenty-three authors, publishing professionals, and scholars who share Matthew J. Bruccoli's love and knowledge of books offer candid observations and opinions about the past, present, and future of publishing. In doing so, they unravel many of the mysteries surrounding this tradition-bound endeavor.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930), African American novelist, editor, journalist, playwright, historian, and public intellectual, used fiction to explore and intervene in the social, racial, and political challenges of her era. Her particular form of cultural activism was groundbreaking for its time and continues to influence and inspire authors and scholars today. This collection of essays constitutes a new phase in the full historical and literary recovery of her work. JoAnn Pavletich argues that considered from the broadest of perspectives, Hopkins’s life work occupies itself with the critique and creation of epistemologies that control racialized knowledge and experience. Whether in representations of a critical contemporary problem such as lynching, imperialism, or pan-African unity or in representations of African American women’s voices, Hopkins’s texts create new knowledge and new frames for understanding it. The essays in this collection engage this knowledge, articulating nuanced understandings of Hopkins’s era and her innovative writing practices, opening new doors for the next generation of Hopkins scholarship. With contributions from well-established Hopkins scholars such as John Gruesser (editor of The Unruly Voice) and Hanna Wallinger (author of Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography), the collection also includes important new scholars on Hopkins such as Elizabeth Cali, Edlie Wong, and others.