Biblio.com - the little book company with a large selection and a lot of heart. Read more

cart Cart 0 items

A Star-Bright Lie

by Coleman Dowell


Review this book!

Coleman Dowell came to New York City in 1950--a young gay man who resolved that he would try to make a name for himself in the frustrating world of show business. This memoir tells his story and includes devastating portraits of Tennessee Williams, David Merrick, Carl Van Vechten, and others.


Available editions of A Star-Bright Lie

9781564780225 9781564780225, Hardcover, Dalkey Archive Pr, 1993

$6.32 (fine/fine )

Other copies of 9781564780225
   

Publisher Notes

A Star-Bright Lie recounts the age-old story of the young provincial who comes to New York and is dazzled and betrayed by the bright lights of Broadway, but with a few kinks to the story: the provincial in this case was gay and would later develop into one of America's finest novelists. Coleman Dowell left Kentucky for New York in 1950 and spent the next decade trying to "make it" in the big city. With the same stylish verve and searching analysis that illuminate his fiction, Dowell recounts his frustrating experiences in show biz: early success as staff composer for a TV show (to which he was recommended by Tennessee Williams); next, touted as David Merrick's "Golden Boy", a failed attempt to adapt O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! as a musical; several other attempts at a hit on Broadway; and finally, a sabotaged venture at making a musical of Carl Van Vechten's novel The Tattooed Countess. Throughout this memoir are unsparing portraits of Williams, Merrick, Van Vechten, Isak Dinesen, and others of the period. But the real star is Dowell himself: "his paranoia, his bedeviled fascination with glamour, his lyric response to nature, his nostalgia for a Kentucky he'd fled and then reinvented, his Gothic sense of horror, his touchy pride, his passion for black men, his alienation from both heterosexual society and the two forms of gay life he'd known" (from novelist Edmund White's foreword). Illustrated with eight pages of photographs (many, including the cover, by Van Vechten).

Review this book!


Similar books


The Last Party
The Last Party by Adele Mailer
Paradise Outlaws
Paradise Outlaws by John Tytell
Dorothy Parker, What Fresh Hell Is This?
Dorothy Parker, What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade
Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom
Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom by Kendall Taylor
Lovecraft Remembered
Lovecraft Remembered by

Sign up to receive offers and updates: