DIVDIVIn the earliest published diaries of Ned Rorem, the acclaimed American composer recalls a bygone era and its luminaries, celebrates the creative process, and examines the gay culture of Europe and the US during the 1950s/divDIV One of America’s most significant contemporary composers, Ned Rorem is also widely acclaimed as a diarist of unique insight and refreshing candor. Together, his Paris Diary, first published in 1966, and The New York Diary,which followed a year later, paint a colorful landscape of Rorem’s world and its famous inhabitants, as well as a fascinating self-portrait of a footloose young artist unabashedly drinking deeply of life. In this amalgam of forthright personal reflections and cogent social commentary, unprecedented for its time, Rorem’s anecdotal recollections of the decade from 1951 to 1961 represent Gay Liberation in its infancy as the author freely expresses his open sexuality not as a revelation but as a simple fact of life./divDIV /divDIVAt once blisteringly honest and exquisitely entertaining, Rorem’s diaries expound brilliantly on the creative process, following their peripatetic author from Paris to Morocco to Italy and back home to America as he crosses paths with Picasso, Cocteau, Gide, Boulez, and other luminaries of the era. /divDIV /divWith consummate skill and unexpurgated insight, a younger, wilder Rorem reflects on a bygone time and culture and, in doing so, holds a revealing mirror to himself. /div

DIVDIVThe esteemed American composer and unabashed diarist Ned Rorem provides a fascinating, brazenly intimate first-person account of his life and career during one of the most extraordinary decades of the twentieth century /divDIV Ned Rorem is often considered an American treasure, one of the greatest contemporary composers in the US. In 1966, he revealed another side of his remarkable talent when The Paris Diary was published, and a year later, The New York Diary, both to wide critical acclaim. In The Later Diaries,Rorem continues to explore his world and his music in intimate journal form, covering the years 1961 to 1972, one of his most artistically productive decades./divDIV /divDIVThe Ned Rorem revealed in The Later Diaries is somewhat more mature and worldly than the young artist of the earlier works, but no less candid or daring, as he reflects on his astonishing life, loves, friendships, and rivalries during an epoch of staggering, sometimes volatile change. Writing with intelligence, insight, and honesty, he recalls time spent with some of the most famous, and infamous, artists of the era—Philip Roth, Christopher Isherwood, Tallulah Bankhead, and Edward Albee, among others—openly exploring his sexuality and his art while offering fascinating, sometimes blistering, views on the art of his contemporaries./div/div

DIVDIVThe acclaimed author of The Paris Diary, Pulitzer Prize–winning American composer Ned Rorem offers readers a mellow, thoughtful, and candid chronicle of his life, work, and contemporaries/divDIV One of our most revered contemporary musical artists—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and declared “the world’s best composer of art songs” by Time magazine—Ned Rorem writes that he is “a composer who writes, not a writer who composes.” Despite this claim, Rorem’s published diaries, memoirs, essay collections, and other nonfiction works have all received resounding acclaim for their lyricism, bold honesty, and insightful social commentary./divDIV /divDIVHis Nantucket Diary, covering the years 1973 through 1985, reveals a more mature and graceful Ned Rorem, a man who has experienced great loss and serious illness yet has lost none of his acute observational skills and keenly opinionated nature. His wit remains bracing and his candor refreshing as he offers sharp critiques on the state of modern classical music and its creators. His accounts of times shared with luminaries and legends, musical and otherwise (including Leonard Bernstein, Edward Albee, Virgil Thomson, and Stephen Sondheim) are consistently enthralling and delightful. The outspoken hedonist of The Paris Diary may be older and more subdued now, but his incisive observations and unique outlook on life, both personal and creative, remain an unforgettable reading experience./div/div

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