The author provides a road map for pop culture sites, from Patty Hearst's bank to Seinfeld's diner, and the lonely strip where Dean met his maker.

With extensive research, this account of the Hollywood star and his legion of fans offers “the best narrative yet of Dean’s final ten hours” (San Francisco Examiner). Just before sunset on September 20, 1955, James Byron Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder collided with Donald Gene Turnupseed’s Ford Tudor on California Highway 46. At age twenty-four, America’s newest screen idol was dead. But what really happened? Drawing on original documents, including the coroner’s inquest and other previously unpublished material, author Warren Newton Beath provides a painstakingly accurate reconstruction of Dean’s final hours and tragic death. In addition, Beath explores Dean’s life and his enduring status as a cultural icon, including Elvis Presley’s worship of him; Hitchcock’s use of Highway 46 in the famous crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest; death threats against Giant director George Stevens if he dared excise a single frame of Deans’ final performance; and many more fascinating facts about the enigmatic screen legend. Beath’s definitive account concludes with a memorable portrait of the James Dean cult, a strangely moving record of his posthumous life in the hearts of his adoring fans.

This encyclopedic look at America's most famous and infamous pop culture events includes information on more than 600 landmarks, as well as their exact locations, including the beauty salon where Marilyn Monroe first bleached her hair.

In the decades following his death, many of those who knew James Dean best––actors, directors, friends, lovers (both men and women), photographers, and Hollywood columnists––shared stories of their first-person experiences with him in interviews and in the articles and autobiographies they wrote. Their recollections of Dean became lost in fragile back issues of movie magazines and newspapers and in out-of-print books that are extremely hard to find. Until now. The Real James Dean is the first book of its kind: a rich collection spanning six decades of writing in which many of the people whose lives were touched by Dean recall their indelible experiences with him in their own words. Here are the memorable personal accounts of Dean from his high school and college drama teachers; the girl he almost married; costars like Rock Hudson, Natalie Wood, Jim Backus, and Raymond Massey; directors Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, and George Stevens; entertainer Eartha Kitt; gossip queen Hedda Hopper; the passenger who accompanied Dean on his final, fatal road trip; and a host of his other friends and colleagues.

James Dean's short life and three-film career inspired countless actors and rebellious teenagers, but his untimely death in a 1955 car crash has been an inspiration of a different kind. The ensuing decades have seen a continuing fascination with Dean's life, and have also fostered legions of devotees fascinated by his death. With the expected (death site pilgrims, alternative theorists, reports of Dean's ghost hitchhiking along that fated highway), there are the odd, the unbelievable and the downright wacky: lingering love affairs with Dean's ghost, visions of his disembodied head, and, of course, reports that he's alive and well, raising chickens and drinking rum with buddies in South America. The ongoing, growing fascination, folklore and legend surrounding the life and death of James Dean is testament that the cult of celebrity death is alive and well. This encyclopedia of James Dean-related subjects includes entries on such topics as associates, locales, books, and ephemera associated with his life. It focuses intensely on the events and people linked to his fatal crash, and on the body of myth, mystery and folklore surrounding Dean's tragic death.

Elvis Presley Passed Here is an amazing portrait of the bizarre, shocking, weird, and wonderful moments that have come to define American popular culture. The follow-up to the critically acclaimed James Dean Died Here and Marilyn Monroe Dyed Here, this third collection of the locations where the most significant events in American popular culture took place offers a fully illustrated encyclopedic look at the most famous--and infamous--pop culture events, providing historical information on more than 600 landmarks as well as their exact locations (including, of course, the Los Angeles park where Elvis Presley and his entourage would organize spirited touch football games against other celebrities).

In Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, readers take an evocative journey with author Keith Elliot Greenberg as he pieces together the puzzle of James Dean's final day and its everlasting impact. Greenberg travels to Dean's hometown to talk with folks who knew the star, and all the way to the California roads that underlay the tires of the actor's infamous Porsche Spyder. Taking the story back and forth in time, Greenberg gives insight into what drove Dean to live on the edge – the early loss of his mother, his relentless drive to explore for the sake of his craft. Dean once said, “Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.” He lived to experience, and the one love that compared to his love of acting was his love of racing cars. Greenberg puts the event in historical context, reflecting on the world Dean lived in at the time, an era after World War II, the end of the Korean War, the advent of rock and roll, with the sixties coming down the pike. The star's too-soon departure froze him as a symbol of American Cool, and as proven by the 20 000 people who return to Dean's grave each year to pay homage, a major influence on youth culture for myriad generations. With fresh interviews with insiders, riveting storytelling, and acute attention to details – from vehicle specs to Dean's stops along the way (including for an ominous speeding ticket) to how the news reached the world – Greenberg delivers a thoughtful look at this historical moment.