"This is the colorful and dramatic biography of two of America's most controversial entrepreneurs: Moses Louis Annenberg, 'the racing wire king, ' who built his fortune in racketeering, invested it in publishing, and lost much of it in the biggest tax evasion case in United States history; and his son, Walter, launcher of TV Guide and Seventeen magazines and former ambassador to Great Britain."--Jacket.

Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves. The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.

We’ve all taken a dislike to someone for no real reason. But few of us nurture this hatred like the narrator of "Moon-Face". The target of his irrational malice is a man named John Claverhouse. With cold precision, the narrator sets to planning the man’s downfall. Why he has this urge, he can’t explain. But he knows he’ll feel immense satisfaction when John Claverhouse is made to suffer. In this macabre little tale, Jack London pinpoints a very common but unpleasant human trait. And then takes it to a horrifying extreme. This short story collection also includes "All Gold Canyon", which was adapted as part of the Netflix anthology movie "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs". Jack London (1876–1916) was one of the first American writers to achieve worldwide celebrity. He did so with rugged adventure stories set in forbidding landscapes. And heroes who survive by embracing their most primal instincts. His breakthrough best seller was "The Call of the Wild". Inspired by his time in the Klondike Gold Rush, this hard-hitting novel is told from the perspective of a sled dog named Buck. It’s inspired many adaptations, including a big-budget movie starring Harrison Ford. Among London’s other notable works are "White Fang", also featuring a canine protagonist, as well as "The Sea-Wolf", "Martin Eden" and "The Iron Heel".

A twelfth-century poem by the creator of the Arthurian romance describes the courageous exploits and triumphs of a brave lord who tries to win back his deserted wife's love