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Thomas Mann: Eros & Literature

Biographies & Memoirs

Heilbut, Anthony

Arts & Literature

Macmillan

A dazzling exploration of American culture—from high pop to highbrow—by acclaimed music authority, cultural historian, and biographer Anthony Heilbut, author of the now classic The Gospel Sound (“Definitive” —Rolling Stone), Exiled in Paradise, and Thomas Mann (“Electric”—Harold Brodkey). In The Fan Who Knew Too Much, Heilbut writes about art and obsession, from country blues singers and male sopranos to European intellectuals and the originators of radio soap opera—figures transfixed and transformed who helped to change the American cultural landscape. Heilbut writes about Aretha Franklin, the longest-lasting female star of our time, who changed performing for women of all races. He writes about Aretha’s evolution as a singer and performer (she came out of the tradition of Mahalia Jackson); before Aretha, there were only two blues-singing gospel women—Dinah Washington, who told it like it was, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who specialized, like Aretha, in ambivalence, erotic gospel, and holy blues. We see the influence of Aretha’s father, C. L. Franklin, famous pastor of Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church. Franklin’s albums preached a theology of liberation and racial pride that sold millions and helped prepare the way for Martin Luther King Jr. Reverend Franklin was considered royalty and, Heilbut writes, it was inevitable that his daughter would become the Queen of Soul. In “The Children and Their Secret Closet,” Heilbut writes about gays in the Pentecostal church, the black church’s rock and shield for more than a hundred years, its true heroes, and among its most faithful members and vivid celebrants. And he explores, as well, the influential role of gays in the white Pentecostal church. In “Somebody Else’s Paradise,” Heilbut writes about the German exiles who fled Hitler—Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Marlene Dietrich, and others—and their long reach into the world of American science, art, politics, and literature. He contemplates the continued relevance of the émigré Joseph Roth, a Galician Jew, who died an impoverished alcoholic and is now considered the peer of Kafka and Thomas Mann. And in “Brave Tomorrows for Bachelor’s Children,” Heilbut explores the evolution of the soap opera. He writes about the form itself and how it catered to social outcasts and have-nots; the writers insisting its values were traditional, conservative; their critics seeing soap operas as the secret saboteurs of traditional marriage—the women as castrating wives; their husbands as emasculated men. Heilbut writes that soaps went beyond melodrama, deep into the perverse and the surreal, domesticating Freud and making sibling rivalry, transference, and Oedipal and Electra complexes the stuff of daily life. And he writes of the “daytime serial’s unwed mother,” Irna Phillips, a Chicago wannabe actress (a Margaret Hamilton of the shtetl) who created radio’s most seminal soap operas—Today’s Children, The Road of Life among them—and for television, As the World Turns, Guiding Light, etc., and who became known as the “queen of the soaps.” Hers, Heilbut writes, was the proud perspective of someone who didn’t fit anywhere, the stray no one loved. The Fan Who Knew Too Much is a revelatory look at some of our American icons and iconic institutions, high, low, and exalted.

The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations

Arts & Photography

Music

KNOPF

This book relays the complete history of gospel music, paying special attention to the relationship between gospel and other African American musical forms in America such as jazz and RandB. It discusses specific gospel music singers as well as the world of the gospel church itself. Includes black-and-white photos.

The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times

Anchor Press

Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature

Here is a groundbreaking biography of one of the century's most important writers. Anthony Heilbut has plumbed the posthumously-published Mann diaries to give us a fresh and engaging examination of Thomas Mann's life and to reinvigorate the themes of his great body of work.

University of California Press

A brilliant look at the writers, artists, scientists, movie directors, and scholars—ranging from Bertolt Brecht to Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, and Fritz Lang—who fled Hitler's Germany and how they changed the very fabric of American culture. In a new postscript, Heilbut draws attention to the recent changes in reputation and image that have shaped the reception of the German exiles.

Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)

History & Criticism

A brilliant look at the writers, artists, scientists, movie directors, and scholars—ranging from Bertolt Brecht to Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, and Fritz Lang—who fled Hitler's Germany and how they changed the very fabric of American culture. In a new postscript, Heilbut draws attention to the recent changes in reputation and image that have shaped the reception of the German exiles. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983 with a paperback in 1997.

Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) (Volume 16)

Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present (Volume 16) (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)

Recounts the backgrounds and transplanted lives of the poets, painters, novelists, filmmakers, scientists, historians, and philosophers who fled Nazi Germany for America, and discusses their changing attitudes toward the United States

Exiled in Paradise

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Viking Adult

Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the Present (Beacon Paperback, 677)

Beacon Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Heilbut, Anthony. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Heilbut, Anthony

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Heilbut, Anthony. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Thomas Mann: Eros & Literature

The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations

The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times

Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature

Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature

Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)

Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) (Volume 16)

Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present (Volume 16) (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)

Exiled in Paradise

Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the Present (Beacon Paperback, 677)