Louise Brooks: A Biography

by Barry Paris

Overview

The long-awaited republication of this captivating account of the star’s life.

Louise Brooks left Wichita, Kansas, for New York City at age fifteen and lived the kind of life of which legends are made. From her beginnings as a dancer to her years in Hollywood, Berlin, and beyond, she was hailed and reviled as a new type of woman: independent, intellectually daring, and sexually free. In this widely acclaimed, first and only comprehensive biography, Barry Paris traces Brooks’s trajectory from her childhood through her fall into obscurity and subsequent "resurrection" as a brilliant writer and enduring film icon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816637812
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	08/03/2000
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	624
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Barry Paris is an award-winning biographer, film and music critic, and contributor to the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other publications. He lives in Pittsburgh.

Editorial Reviews

A necessary and stimulating book, it is itself an important part of Brook's life after death.

The New Republic

Unquestionably the film biography of the year is Barry Paris's Louise Brooks great, provocative reading.
—Leonard Maltin, ABC-TV Entertainment Tonight

Leonard Maltin

A sensational work‹it's a wow!
— New York Daily News

Liz Smith

Paris has researched and reported faithfully every aspect of Brooks¹s life. The story he tells is fascinating not only for what it says about Brooks, but also for its generous sidelights on the whole jazz-and-flapper age.
—The Washington Post

John Simon

The much-talked-about Louise Brooks is among the worthiest Hollywood bios of the year: a synthesis of exhaustive research, written with imaginative sympathy.

Premiere Magazine

Thorough and fascinating

People Magazine

Paris is superb, every detail opening onto another plane or almost subliminally doubling back to an incident charted a hundred pages earlier, the full weight of Brook's exile coming home with increasing power, right to the end of her life. The second half of the book is riveting: complex, subtle, noisy, finally quiet. You don¹t care that Paris can't solve the mystery. You care that a woman lived a life that made it.
—California Magazine

Greil Marcus

Paris's book is the one the faithful have been waiting for. The research is exhaustive, the details scrupulously attended, and all enhanced by access to Brook¹s unpublished writing. The result is thorough, documented and tangible. Even better, Paris does Brooks two services that propel his book well past for-addicts-only status. He is savvy enough to grasp that half of the Brooks mythology is the setting, and he gives it to us up-close and in the round. But his wisest choice is his deference to Brook's own voice. He lets her larger statements about the human condition, her own and otherwise, speak for themselves. Brooks's story is Cinderella rewritten for the apocalypse, and Paris and Brooks tell it straight, twists included.

New York Outweek

A superb biography. Paris¹s definitive work shows us why Brooks belongs, if not in the pantheon of film stardom, in the front rank of 20th-century personalities.

San Diego Tribune