"Hello, Suckers!" Every night she flung that greeting at the Jazz Age flappers and gents who crowded in to see the "Queen of the Nightclubs" work her magic. They came to laugh and drink and forget the world outside - and Texas Guinan kept the party going. She was the wittiest nightclub hostess in New York, and her clubs had the best floor shows, the most elegant decor, and all the bootleg liquor that furtively exchanged dollars could buy. Here is the story of Texas Guinan - nightclub hostess, theater and vaudeville actress, and star of silent westerns. Louise Berliner, a granddaughter of the lawyer who defended Guinan at her notorious "public nuisance" trial in 1929, follows the whole course of Guinan's life (1884-1933), from her childhood in a devout Catholic home in Waco, Texas, to her celebrity funeral and burial with diamonds in one hand and a rosary in the other. Like a female Gatsby, Texas Guinan invented a past appropriate for the character she became. Berliner explores this fascinating process of self-creation, separating fact from the fictions that Guinan wove about her life. In so doing, she illuminates the era of early musical comedies in New York and on the vaudeville circuit, the two-reeler silent westerns in which Guinan starred as a lady gunslinger, and the New York club life that Guinan promoted as "an essential and basic industry". Texas Guinan seemed to know everyone in the Roaring Twenties - the Prince of Wales, Ruby Keeler, George Raft, Rudolph Valentino, Walter Winchell, Mae West, Aimee Semple MacPherson, and even President Harding - and Berliner offers intriguing views of Guinan's relationship with many of these varied personalities. This timely book, the firstfully documented study of Guinan's life, will be important for everyone interested in popular culture, the Jazz Age, and women's studies. It brings to life a woman of amazing vitality and surprising contradictions, as captivating as any character imagined by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In 1919, the United States made its boldest attempt at social reform: Prohibition. This "noble experiment" was aggressively promoted, and spectacularly unsuccessful, in New York City. In the first major work on Prohibition in a quarter century, and the only full history of Prohibition in the era's most vibrant city, Lerner describes a battle between competing visions of the United States that encompassed much more than the freedom to drink.

Illustrated with archival photographs of the clubs and the characters who frequented them, this book is a dark and dazzling study of New York's bygone nightlife.

As Hollywood entered the sound era, it was rightly determined that the same public fascinated by the novelty of the talkie would be dazzled by the spectacle of a song and dance film. In 1929 and 1930, film musicals became the industry's most lucrative genre--until the greedy studios almost killed the genre by glutting the market with too many films that looked and sounded like clones of each other. From the classy movies such as Sunnyside Up and Hallelujah! to failures such as The Lottery Bride and Howdy Broadway, this filmography details 171 early Hollywood musicals. Arranged by subgenre (backstagers, operettas, college films, and stage-derived musical comedies), the entries include studio, release date, cast and credits, running time, a complete song list, any recordings spawned by the film, Academy Award nominations and winners, and availability on video or laserdisc. These data are followed by a plot synopsis, including analysis of the film's place in the genre's history. Includes over 90 photographs.

An award-winning historian surveys the astonishing cast of characters who helped turn Manhattan into the world capital of commerce, communication and entertainment --

Native Texan: Stories from Deep in the Heart is a lively and personal tour of small town and big city Texas in search of what makes the state unique. Nationally acclaimed columnist Joe Holley is widely loved for his popular “Native Texan” column, which appears in the Houston Chronicle. In thirty stories curated from column archives, Holley introduces readers to his favorite people and places across the state. From interviews on the “weird” streets of Austin and his search for ghosts in Bigfoot to a decades-long love affair with everything about Marathon and hikes on the back trails of the Big Bend, Holley is a masterful storyteller. His instincts are backed by a seasoned journalist’s passion to measure legends and tall tales against investigations into what really happened. He reveals small-town Texas, and some small towns within the largest cities, with a style that has proven popular with readers and a keen eye for a unique spin on an old story. The result is an entertaining and certainly surprising view of the Lone Star state.

"Texas Guinan was the queen of New York's speakeasies in the Roaring Twenties. Her clubs were backed by leading gangsters and welcomed some of the city's biggest sharks and swankest swells. Movie stars, flappers, madams, musicians and more flocked to midtown's "Wet Zone," Greenwich Village and Harlem for inebriated entertainment... Author David Rosen recounts Texas's adventurous life alongside tales of Gotham's nightlife when abstinence was the law of the land and breaking the law an all-American indulgence."--Back cover.