Cast of Characters
Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of the New Yorker
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Narrated by:
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Tony Pasqualini
About this listen
The professional and personal lives of the pioneers of an enduring magazine, The New Yorker.
From its birth in 1925 to the early days of the Cold War, The New Yorker slowly but surely took hold as the country's most prestigious, entertaining, and informative general-interest periodical. In Cast of Characters, Thomas Vinciguerra paints a portrait of the magazine's cadre of charming, wisecracking, driven, troubled, and brilliant writers and editors. He introduces us to Wolcott Gibbs, theater critic, all-around wit, and author of an infamous 1936 parody of Time magazine. We meet the demanding and eccentric founding editor, Harold Ross, who would routinely tell his underlings, "I'm firing you because you are not a genius" and who once mailed a pair of his underwear to Walter Winchell, who had accused him of preferring to go bare bottomed under his slacks.
Joining the cast are the mercurial, blind James Thurber, a brilliant cartoonist and wildly inventive fabulist; and the enigmatic E. B. White - an incomparable prose stylist and Ross' favorite son - who married The New Yorker's formidable fiction editor, Katharine Angell. Then there is the dashing St. Clair McKelway, who was married five times and claimed to have no fewer than 12 personalities but was nonetheless a superb reporter and managing editor alike. Many of these characters became legends in their own rights, but Vinciguerra also shows how, as a group, The New Yorker's inner circle brought forth a profound transformation in how life was perceived, interpreted, written about, and published in America.
Cast of Characters may be the most revealing - and entertaining - book yet about the unique personalities who built what Ross called not a magazine but a "movement".
©2016 Thomas Vinciguerra (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald's masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power.
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Reading Gatsby as an adult reveals its greatness!
- By Mark on 10-06-14
By: Maureen Corrigan
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Careless People
- Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby
- By: Sarah Churchwell
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby has become one of the world's best-loved books, delighting audiences across the world. Careless People tells the true story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, exploring in newly rich detail the relation of Fitzgerald's classic to the chaotic world he in which he lived. Fitzgerald set his novel in 1922, and Careless People carefully reconstructs the crucial months during which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald returned to New York in the autumn of 1922.
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Fascinating study of the Fitzgeralds and Jazz Age
- By Sand on 06-11-14
By: Sarah Churchwell
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City Boy
- My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult.
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Pretense upon pretense.
- By Shalin Desai on 06-01-15
By: Edmund White
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Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story
- A Life of David Foster Wallace
- By: D. T. Max
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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David Foster Wallace was the leading literary light of his generation, a man who not only captivated readers with his prose but also mesmerized them with his brilliant mind. In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace’s tormented, anguished, and often triumphant battle to succeed as a novelist as he fights off depression and addiction to emerge with his masterpiece, Infinite Jest.
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Max avoids hagiography or a sycophant's biography
- By Darwin8u on 06-11-13
By: D. T. Max
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Mark Twain: Man in White
- The Grand Adventure of His Final Years
- By: Michael Shelden
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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Pulitzer Prize finalist Michael Shelden illuminates Mark Twain’s twilight years in this brilliant account of the legendary author’s life. Drawing heavily on Twain’s own letters and journals, Mark Twain: Man in White recounts both Twain’s private family experiences and his larger-than-life public image.
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Fantastic book
- By Tad Davis on 08-23-10
By: Michael Shelden
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Reading My Father
- A Memoir
- By: Alexandra Styron
- Narrated by: Alexandra Styron
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexandra Styron's parents—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written with humor, compassion, and grace.
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William Styron Ranks...
- By Douglas on 12-22-13
By: Alexandra Styron
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Rebel Souls
- Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians
- By: Justin Martin
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Rebel Souls is the first book ever written about the colorful group of artists - regulars at Pfaff's Saloon in Manhattan - rightly considered America's original Bohemians. Besides a young Whitman, the circle included actor Edwin Booth; trailblazing stand–up comic Artemus Ward; psychedelic drug pioneer and author Fitz Hugh Ludlow; and brazen performer Adah Menken, famous for her Naked Lady routine. Central to their times, the artists managed to forge connections with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and even Abraham Lincoln.
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A Wonderful Read with Vibrant Characters
- By A on 11-11-15
By: Justin Martin
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A Torch Kept Lit
- Great Lives of the Twentieth Century
- By: William F. Buckley
- Narrated by: Tony Pasqualini
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In a half century on the national stage, William F. Buckley Jr. achieved unique stature as a polemicist and the undisputed godfather of modern American conservatism. He knew everybody, hosted everybody at his East 73rd Street maisonette, skewered everybody who needed skewering, and in general lived life on a scale, and in a swashbuckling manner, that captivated and inspired countless young conservatives across that half century.
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Excellent...inspiring imagery!
- By Lisa Hill on 10-14-16
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The Man with the Golden Typewriter
- By: Ian Fleming, Fergus Fleming
- Narrated by: Julian Rhind-Tutt
- Length: 13 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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On 16 August 1952, Ian Fleming wrote to his wife, Ann, 'My love, This is only a tiny letter to try out my new typewriter and to see if it will write golden words since it is made of gold'. And he did write golden words: 14 best-selling James Bond books, and an equally energetic flow of letters to his wife, publisher, editors, fans, friends and critics, charting 007's progress....
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Ian Fleming revealed through his letters
- By James Litsios on 05-10-18
By: Ian Fleming, and others
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Georgette Heyer
- Biography of a Bestseller
- By: Jennifer Kloester
- Narrated by: Phyllida Nash
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Georgette Heyer remains an enduring international best seller, read and loved by four generations of readers and extolled by today's best-selling authors. Despite her enormous popularity, she never gave an interview or appeared in public. Georgette Heyer wrote her first novel, The Black Moth, when she was 17 in order to amuse her convalescent brother. It was published in 1921 to instant success, and 90 years later it has never been out of print.
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Heyer as a person
- By Jerri C on 06-15-15
What listeners say about Cast of Characters
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Constant Reader
- 06-05-18
But...Where's Dorothy Parker
Much than you ever wanted to know about the early years of the New Yorker, and especially more than you ever wanted to know about Wolcott Gibbs, who's largely forgotten all these years later. The high points are Ross, EB White and Thurber, always Thurber. And what little we get of Charles Addams. But so much Gibbs...and so little Parker, who barely appears. The book needs her...
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11 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-12-21
Great Entertainment
If you look forward to your New Yorker every week, as, I do this is a must read. If you're interested in the cast and characters of the literary scene in New York through the two world wars, this is your book.
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- SteveR
- 11-30-22
Well done
Soap opera, silly fussing and striving, teenage restlessness - and I loved every bit of it.
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- Male Feminist
- 03-05-24
Fascinating stories about legendary literary figures
I loved all of it … it’s amazing how much great work they produced despite their alcoholism .
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- Moire
- 10-30-21
well researched and detailed
too detailed. repeated stories of drunks a rehab. lots of bickering and backstabbing. after 12 hours, I'dhad enough.
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2 people found this helpful