The screenwriter behind North by Northwest and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? skewers show business in these fifteen tales. In Sweet Smell of Success, the main novelette of this collection,Lehman scathingly depicts the dark side of success through the twisted relationship of Sid Wallace, an ambitious publicist, and Harvey Hunsucker, a powerful and vindictive gossip columnist, fashioned after Walter Winchell. As scandals are manufactured and reputations ruined for sport, the story spirals downward toward one last, savage act of revenge. As brutally honest as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most enduring and provocative stories in the literature of show business. In The Comedian, one of America’s most beloved funny men is about to become a television superstar, but a large banana peel awaits him. Meanwhile, the remaining stories dissect the entertainment industry in a way that only Lehman could do . . . Both Sweet Smell of Success and The Comedian were adapted for film. Sweet Smell of Success was a 1957 film starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, while The Comedian was a TV movie starring Mickey Rooney and Edmund O’Brien. “Sweet Smell of Success is a corrosive valentine to New York, embracing its energy and its clashing ambitions.” —Sam Kashner, Vanity Fair “Siddown. Listen to these. They are not Lindy’s cheesecake or long on kisses and schmaltz. But if you like prose pale as a shark’s belly, they do just fine.” —Kirkus Reviews

Mother Catherine Spalding (1793?1858) was the cofounder and first leader of one of the most significant American religious communities for women?the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. Spalding also founded several educational institutions, Louisville's first private hospital, and the first social service agencies for children in Kentucky. In 2003, the Louisville Courier-Journal selected Spalding as the sole woman among the sixteen most important persons in Louisville's history. Pioneer Spirit is the first biography of Spalding, who, from the age of nineteen, served the citizens of the Kentucky frontier. By the time of her death, the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth extended far beyond Bardstown, Kentucky, to over one hundred sisters in sixteen convents. Spalding's legacy of service continues today with more than six hundred members worldwide.

It's New York, 1952. Welcome to Broadway, the glamour and power capital of the universe. J.J. Hunsecker rules it all with his daily gossip column in the New York Globe, syndicated to sixty million readers across America. J.J. has the goods on everyone, from the president to the latest starlet. And everyone feeds J.J. scandal, from J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy down to a battalion of hungry press agents who attach their news to a client that J.J. might plug. When a young press agent, S

The first full-length biography of the actor known for his roles in The Invisible Man, Casablanca, and other classics, based on newly released interviews. Given his childhood speech impediments and his origins in a destitute London neighborhood, the ascent of Claude Rains to the stage and screen was remarkable. Rains’s difficulties in his formative years provided reserves of gravitas and sensitivity, from which he drew inspiration for acclaimed performances in The Invisible Man, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Casablanca, Notorious, Lawrence of Arabia, and other classic films. In this book, noted Hollywood historian David J. Skal draws on more than thirty hours of newly released Rains interviews to create the first full-length biography of the man nominated multiple times for an Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor. Skal’s portrait also benefits from the insights of Jessica Rains, who provides firsthand accounts of the enigmatic man behind her father’s refined screen presence and genteel public persona. As Skal shows, numerous contradictions informed the life and career of Claude Rains. He possessed an air of nobility and became an emblem of sophistication, but he never shed the insecurities that traced back to his upbringing in an abusive and poverty-stricken family. Though deeply self-conscious about his short stature, Rains drew notorious ardor from female fans and was married six times. His public displays of dry wit and good humor masked inner demons that drove Rains to alcoholism and its devastating consequences. Skal’s layered depiction of Claude Rains reveals a complex, almost inscrutable man whose nuanced characterizations were, in no small way, based on the more shadowy parts of his psyche. With unprecedented access to episodes from Rains’s private life, Skal tells the full story of the consummate character actor of his generation. “This highly readable biography, written with the help of his daughter, Jessica Rains, reveals the witty, talented man behind this universally respected Hollywood legend.” —Tucson Citizen

At the age of twenty-five, Orson Welles (1915–1985) directed, co-wrote, and starred in Citizen Kane, widely regarded as the greatest film ever made. But Welles was such a revolutionary filmmaker that he found himself at odds with the Hollywood studio system. His work was so far ahead of its time that he never regained the wide popular following he had once enjoyed as a young actor-director on the radio. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career challenges the conventional wisdom that Welles’s career after Kane was a long decline and that he spent his final years doing little but eating and making commercials while squandering his earlier promise. In this intimate and often surprising personal portrait, Joseph McBride shows instead how Welles never stopped directing radical, adventurous films and was always breaking new artistic ground as a filmmaker. McBride is the first author to provide a comprehensive examination of the films of Welles's artistically rich yet little-known later period in the United States (1970–1985), when McBride knew and worked with him. McBride reports on Welles's daringly experimental film projects, including the legendary 1970–1976 unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, Welles’s satire of Hollywood during the “Easy Rider era”; McBride gives a unique insider perspective on Welles from the viewpoint of a young film critic playing a spoof of himself in a cast headed by John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich. To put Welles’s widely misunderstood later years into context, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? reexamines the filmmaker’s entire life and career. McBride offers many fresh insights into the collapse of Welles’s Hollywood career in the 1940s, his subsequent political blacklisting, and his long period of European exile. An enlightening and entertaining look at Welles's brilliant and enigmatic career as a filmmaker, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? serves as a major reinterpretation of Welles’s life and work. McBride clears away the myths that have long obscured Welles’s later years and have caused him to be falsely regarded as a tragic failure. McBride’s revealing portrait of this great artist will change the terms of how Orson Welles is understood as a man, an actor, a political figure, and a filmmaker.

The inside account of a financial meltdown that reshaped Wall Street In 1983, Lew Glucksman, then co-CEO of the heralded investment bank Lehman Brothers, demanded the resignation of chairman Pete Peterson, with whom he had long argued over how to manage the company. Shockingly, Peterson, who had taken charge a decade earlier and led Lehman from near collapse to record profits, agreed to step down. In this meticulously researched volume, Ken Auletta details the turmoil, infighting, and power struggles that brought about Peterson’s departure and the eventual sale of one of Wall Street’s oldest and most prestigious firms. Set against the backdrop of the 1980s stock exchange, where hotshot young traders made and lost millions in a single afternoon, the story of Lehman’s fall is a suspenseful battle of wills between bankers, traders, and executives motivated by greed, envy, and ego. Auletta, who conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and was granted access to private company records, has crafted a thorough, enduring, and engaging account of pivotal events that continued to influence this storied financial institution until its ultimate demise in 2008.