GOTTFRIED, Martin [Charles Strouse].
Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company , 1984.
We're sorry, this item has sold.
+$500
First Edition of Martin Gottfried's Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius; From the Collection of Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
First edition of Gottfried's acclaimed biography of Jed Harris, the brilliant and notorious wunderkind of the Broadway stage. Octavo, original half-cloth, illustrated with black-and-white photographs. From the collection of Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award-winning composer Charles Strouse and his wife, choreographer Barbara Siman. Over his 50-year career, Charles Strouse wrote the music for such iconic musical theater hits as Bye Bye Birdie, Applause, and Annie, as well as the theme song for the classic sitcom All in the Family ("Those Were the Days"). His partnership with Martin Charnin on Annie produced one of Broadway's most successful scores ever, with "Tomorrow" and other songs from the production becoming enduring American musical standards admired by generations. His reach knew no genre or generation - from a number-one Billboard hit in 1958 to Jay-Z's Grammy-winning sampling of "It's the Hard-Knock Life" four decades later - and his honors include three Tony Awards and induction into both the Songwriters and Theater Halls of Fame. With his ownership stamp to the front free endpaper. Near fine in a very good dust jacket with light chipping to the extremities. An engaging portrait of one of the American theater's most gifted and most difficult figures.
Jed Harris (1900-1979), born Jacob Hirsch Horowitz, was the most dazzling and most feared producer-director of the American theater's golden age. Arriving on Broadway in the 1920s, he produced an extraordinary run of hits before the age of thirty, among them Broadway (1926), Coquette (1927), The Royal Family (1927), and the classic newspaper comedy The Front Page (1928), and in 1938 he produced and directed the premiere of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, one of the defining works of the American stage. His genius was matched by a notorious cruelty: Laurence Olivier, whom Harris directed in The Green Bay Tree, called him "the most loathsome man I'd ever met" and is said to have modeled his celebrated Richard III on Harris, who is also reputed to have inspired Walt Disney's Big Bad Wolf. Drama critic and biographer Martin Gottfried (1933-2014), author of acclaimed lives of Stephen Sondheim and Bob Fosse, traces the full arc of Harris's meteoric rise and long, embittered decline in this definitive 1984 biography.
Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius.
$0.00
Out of Stock
