Author: Constance Rourke Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
Lotta Crabtree was very popular in San Francisco and in 1875 donated to the city a large water fountain, a gathering place for people after the earthquake and fire of 1906. The book discusses other actresses in late 19th century San Francisco.
Author: Constance Mayfield Rourke Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1634506839 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
Originally published in 1928, Troupers of the Gold Coast follows the startup and success of a theater company of the same name that started performing in 1837 at California’s First Theater. More than 2,000 actors and actresses performed and trained with the company between 1848 and 2005. Until their last show in 2005, they were the oldest continually performing theater company in the world. By the time the Troupers found their footing, though, a little girl named Charlotte (Lotta) Crabtree was achieving an early stardom. Since the age of six, she had been performing along the coast for men and women of the Gold Rush. Her mother managed her career, thus ensuring that Lotta was never taken advantage of. She was extremely popular and very successful in acting, singing, dancing, and banjo playing. Lotta, who was named “The Nation’s Darling,” was able to tour the United States and Europe before retiring in her forties. Troupers of the Gold Coast captures the rise of one America’s most beloved entertainers, as well as the formation and excitement surrounding one of the most popular and successful American theater troupes of all time. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Author: Ginny Kubitz Moyer Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1647427231 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
Embark on a journey to 1930s California in Ginny Kubitz Moyer’s spellbinding historical novel in which a woman must choose between friendship and her own secrets. It’s 1938, and twenty-five-year-old secretary Frances Healey is ready for a fresh start. Hoping to forget her painful past, she takes a job working for Hollywood producer Lawrence Merrill. She quickly becomes absorbed in VistaGlen Studios’s biggest project: a movie about Kitty Ridley, the legendary stage actress who disappeared from the public eye in 1895. The movie will be the making of Belinda Vail, a beautiful ingenue who is hungry for a breakout role—and also happens to be Mr. Merrill’s love interest. But the real Miss Ridley has other ideas. Now ninety years old, she writes a scathing letter insisting the studio halt production of the film. Hoping to change her mind, Frances and Mr. Merrill embark on a trip to find the actress—only to land in a Victorian farmhouse in the Napa Valley. But as she learns the truth of Miss Ridley’s life, Frances finds herself confronting the very past she’s been trying to forget. And with the arrival of the ambitious Belinda, loyalties will be tested, bonds will be forged, and Frances will learn where true happiness lies. Set in Hollywood and the sun-drenched Napa countryside, A Golden Life explores friendship, forgiveness, and the power of honoring your own story.
Author: Dorothy Dean Stevens Publisher: iUniverse ISBN: 0595484417 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
Internationally traveled and familiar with salons and personalities of the dance world, we find a stroll through the years as Dorothy Dean Stevens gives us glimpses of personal encounters with leading dancers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She begins by tracing her ancestors settling in the west; on through her early years, then to her entrance into the hallowed halls of European Ballet and the continued ties with leading dancers. Early in her life she studied at Cornish School of the Arts and later with Eugene Lorin. Such notables as Adolf Bolm, and Dimitri Romanoff, instructed in her dance studio in Monterey California. Sucessful dancers such as Frank Bourman, and Michael Smuin, who later founded the Smuin Ballet in San Francisco, taught for a time at Dorothy's studio. She also covers the development of the cultural arts, tracing theater and talent that existed in the central California region of the Monterey Peninsula. But there is more to her life than this; travel and adventure, business and pleasure all woven into a tale of her life. Dorothy dances through joys and sorrows to the encore years in which her family, once again, takes the spot light.
Author: Shauna Vey Publisher: SIU Press ISBN: 0809334399 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
From 1855 until 1863, the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Comedians, a professional acting company of approximately thirty children, entertained audiences with their nuanced performances of adult roles on stages around the globe. In Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors, author Shauna Vey provides an insightful account not only of this unique antebellum stage troupe but also of contemporary theatre practices and the larger American culture, including shifts in the definition of childhood itself. Looking at the daily work lives of five members of the Marsh Troupe—the father and manager, Robert Marsh, and four child performers, Mary Marsh, Alfred Stewart, Louise Arnot, and Georgie Marsh—Vey reveals the realities of the antebellum theatre and American society: the rise of the nineteenth-century impresario; the emerging societal constructions of girlhood and goodness; the realities of child labor; the decline of the apprenticeship model of actor training; shifts in gender roles and the status of working women; and changes in the economic models of theatre production, including the development of the stock company system. Both a microhistory of a professional theatre company and its juvenile players in the decade before the Civil War and a larger narrative of cultural change in the United States, Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre sheds light on how childhood was idealized both on and off the stage, how the role of the child in society shifted in the nineteenth century, and the ways economic value and sentiment contributed to how children were viewed.
Author: Alfred Habegger Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231053975 Category : American fiction Languages : en Pages : 402
Book Description
In this study of the 19th-century American novel, the author demonstrates the imaginative continuity between sentimental and realistic fiction and sets out to establish that realism is the central and preeminent literary type in America, a mode grounded in the tradition of women's popular fiction which shaped the nation's reading habits in the mid-19th century. He examines this feminine literature, with its common technique of symbolizing deeper social conflicts through patterns of courtship, marriage, and gender roles. Contends that Howells and James owe much of their fictional domain to the often-disparaged household dramas of these female precursors.
Author: Joan Shelley Rubin Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469644177 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
The career of Constance Rourke (1885-1941) is one of the richest examples of the American writer's search for a "usable past." In this first full-length study of Rourke, Joan Shelley Rubin establishes the context for Rourke's defense of American culture -- the controversies that engaged her, the books that influenced her thinking, the premises that lay beneath her vocabulary. With the aid of Rourke's unpublished papers, the author explores her responses to issues that were compelling for her generation of intellectuals: the critique of America as materialistic and provincial; the demand for native traditions in the arts; the modern understanding of the nature of culture and myth; and the question of a critic's role in a democracy. Rourke's writings demonstrate that America did not suffer, as Van Wyck Brooks and others had maintained, from a damaging split between "high-brow" and "low-brow" but was rather a rich, unified culture in which the arts could thrive. Her classic American Humor (1931) and her biographies of Lotta Crabtree, Davy Crockett, Audubon, and Charles Sheeler celebrate the American as mythmaker. To foster what she called the "possession" of the national heritage, she used an evocative prose style accessible to a wide audience and depicted the frontier in more abstract terms than did other contempoaray scholars. Her commitment to social reform, acquired in her youth and strengthened at Vassar in the Progressive era, informed her sense of the function of criticism and guided her political activites in the 1930s. Drawing together Rourke's varied discussions of popular heroes, comic lore, literature, and art, Rubin illuminates the delicate balances and sometimes contradictory arguments underlying Rourke's description of America's cultural patterns. She also analyzes the way Rourke's encounters with the ideas of Van Wyck Brooks, Ruth Benedict, Jane Harrison, Bernard DeVoto, and Lewis Mumford shaped her view of America's achievements and possibilities. Rourke emerges not simply as a follower of Brooks or as a colleague of De Voto, nor even as an antiquarian or folklorist. Rather, she assumes her own unique and proper place -- as a pioneer who, more than anyone else of her day, boldly and eloquently showed Americans that they had the resources necessary for the future of both art and society. By placing Constance Rourke within the framework of a debate about the nature of American culture, the author makes a notable contribution to American intellectual history. Originally published in 1980. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Author: Constance Rourke
Author: Constance Mayfield Rourke
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Author: Ginny Kubitz Moyer
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Author: Dorothy Dean Stevens
Author: Shauna Vey
Author: Alfred Habegger
Author: Library of Congress. Copyright Office
Author: Joan Shelley Rubin