Samuel Koteliansky was never a major figure in the Bloomsbury circle. Author Leon Edel never even mentions him in Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, his masterful portrait of the loose affiliation of writers and artists associated with the London-based Bloomsbury circle. Neither is Koteliansky mentioned in the other books about Bloomsbury on my shelf. We…
Woody Allen once famously quipped: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” Whether or not he achieves his wish, his name has already attained the poetic equivalent of immortality due to his extraordinary film career. Although the celebrated writer-director has often portrayed himself on screen…
Eighty years ago this summer, in June 1931, New York publisher Covici Friede announced that A Jew in Love, a new novel by Ben Hecht (1894-1964), had been banned in Canada and in bookstores in Boston and other American cities. Anyone who opened the book — the front page of which described the Jewish protagonist…
If you have trouble sleeping, don’t read Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War On America. The book, an in-depth study of the criminal mastermind who tops the world’s most wanted list, was written by Yossef Bodansky, a former consultant to the U.S. Departments of Defense and State. It first appeared two years ago and…
A new book on Canada’s role as a haven for international terrorism provides alarming details on how border and immigration authorities here have repeatedly slipped up and allowed known Middle Eastern and other terrorists to enter the country and even attain citizenship. In his new book Cold Terror, author Stewart Bell documents how the country’s…
“Harpo Marx, having played a mute in all his films, was probably the most articulate of all the Marx brothers,” declares Barbara McGurn as we sit in the Oak Room of New York’s famed Algonquin Hotel, awaiting the entrance of cabaret performer K.T. Sullivan. The next moment McGurn, who is equal parts literary scholar and…
In her day Fannie Hurst was one of America’s highest-paid authors, but ask any bookstore clerk today for one of her 18 novels, such as the bestselling Imitation of Life, and chances are you’ll receive only a blank stare. Between 1914 and 1930, Fannie Hurst’s phenomenal literary career blazed meteorically across the pages of popular…
William E. Dodd, the United States’ newly appointed ambassador to Germany in 1933, was a Jeffersonian democrat, a history professor working on a volume on the old American South, and a Sunday farmer with old-fashioned values who seemed so out of step with his new posting that one magazine called him “a square academic peg…
Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf, a 508-page hardcover biography by Simon Louvish (Faber & Faber, 2008) covers the life and career of the legendary American film director from his birth in 1881 to his death in 1958, two years after he completed his last and most famous film, The Ten Commandments. DeMille always…
Not having published a thing in almost half a century apparently hasn’t diminished the fame of America’s most reclusive writer. J. D. Salinger died in January at the age of 91, prompting some hopeful observers to wonder whether he left a vault full of manuscripts to be published posthumously. Born in New York in 1919…
