A Star Bright Lie - Hardcover

Dowell, Coleman; White, Edmund; Kuehl, Linda; Kuehl, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1564780228 ISBN 13: 9781564780225

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1993

Synopsis

Rare Book

About this title

Review:

A witty, engaging account... [A] sparkling memoir. -- Publishers Weekly Embedded within this mad, anxiety-provoking book are assumptions about success which help to explain Dowell's anguishingly contradictory nature, and which reveal, finally, much about the meaning of success in America, and in New York in particular. -- Times Literary Supplement Entertaining in itself, A Star-Bright Lie also provides a good introduction to this interesting and still under-recognized writer. -- Washington Post Book World

From the Back Cover:

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).

About this edition

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1564780228
• ISBN 13: 9781564780225
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 165