Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved into a Culture of Fans and Followers

by Landon Y. Jones

Overview

A former People magazine editor reveals how our cult of celebrity has shaped our politics, our culture, and our personal lives—for better or worse

From the writer and editor who coined the term “baby boomer” comes Celebrity Nation, an exploration into how and why fame no longer stems only from heroic achievements but from the number of “likes” and shares—and what this change means for American culture. Landon Jones—who spent decades in “celebrityland” only to emerge, like Alice, blinking in the sunlight—brings a personal and first-person perspective on fame and its dark underbelly, complicated even further by the arrival of the internet and social media.

Jones draws on his experience as the former managing editor of People magazine to bolster his account with profiles of celebrities he knew personally, ranging from Malcolm X to Princess Diana, as well as observations about contemporary social media stars like Kim Kardashian and computer-generated macro-influencer Miquela, a self-proclaimed “19-year-old Robot living in LA.” In analyzing the stories of over 75 celebrities, spanning decades and industries, Jones shows how celebrity has been wielded as a weapon of mass distraction to spawn narcissism, harm, and loneliness.

And yet, in these stories we also see a path forward. Jones highlights luminaries like Nobel Peace prize winner Maria Ressa and lauded environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who have effected meaningful change not by glorifying themselves but by turning to their communities for action. A lively analysis of celebrity culture’s impact on nearly every facet of our lives, Celebrity Nation helps us to recognize how the apparatus of fame operates.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807065655
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	05/09/2023
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	644,795
Product dimensions:	5.71(w) x 8.78(h) x 0.87(d)

About the Author

Landon Y. (Lanny) Jones is an editor and author. He is the former managing editor of People and Money magazines and the author of William Clark and the Shaping of the West (2004), a biography of the co-leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Jones also edited a selection of the expedition journals, The Essential Lewis and Clark (2000). In 1980, he published Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, which coined the phrase “baby-boomer” and was a finalist for the American Book Award in Nonfiction. In 2015, he received the Henry R. Luce Award for Lifetime Achievement from Time Inc. He is from St. Louis, Missouri, and currently resides in Princeton, New Jersey.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
The Celebrity-Industrial Complex

CHAPTER 1
How It Started

CHAPTER 2
Bread and Circuses: The History of Fame

CHAPTER 3
The Dark Side of Celebrity

CHAPTER 4
When Big Names Did Good Works

CHAPTER 5
Sex, Lies, and Social Media

CHAPTER 6
How Celebrities Hijacked Heroes

CHAPTER 7
Celebrity Worship

CHAPTER 8
The Selling of Celebrity

CHAPTER 9
The Human Costs of Celebrity

CHAPTER 10
Swimming with Narcissus

CHAPTER 11
Stories Celebrities Tell

CHAPTER 12
Shape-Shifting: Cameos and Podcasts

CHAPTER 13
“R U Real?”

CHAPTER 14
The Future of Fame

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

03/27/2023

In this hit-or-miss survey, former People magazine editor Jones (Great Expectations) contends that “the preoccupation with romanticizing celebrity has led to a coarsening of American culture” and a shift away from the “harder-won values of heroes—accomplishment, achievement, selflessness, inspiration.” There was a time, Jones recalls, when celebrity and heroism were more closely intertwined, and the book’s most successful sections detail the author’s encounters with Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Diana, and other famous figures who used their renown as a force for good. Though Jones acknowledges that the rise of social media has helped diversify “the halls of celebrity,” he takes a dim view of such stars as Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, for whom “becoming a celebrity was not an achievement but rather a condition—the condition of being talked about.” Other topics include the role of 19th-century theatrical portraits in fostering “the primacy of the celebrity image,” the rise of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and other celebrity brands, and the advent of CGI influencers like Miquela Sousa, whose Instagram account describes her as “a 19-year-old Robot living in L.A.” Though Jones is an astute chronicler of celebrity culture, his observations don’t quite gel into a cohesive thesis. Still, gossip hounds will have much to chew on. (May)

Publishers Weekly

A disquieting, well-researched exploration of the celebrity phenomenon and its consequences for our society.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Jones is an astute chronicler of celebrity culture.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A well-researched, astute examination of the blurred lines between heroes and celebrities. The book’s narrative and plot points are immensely readable.”
—Library Journal

“Others have—and will—explore this topic in more depth, but Jones’s clear-eyed, often rueful take on the phenomenon is an excellent starting point.”
—Shelf Awareness

“A triumph of human insight into an all-too-often inhuman institution that can become a mortal threat to celebrities themselves.”
—The Milken Review

“An irresistibly readable history and critique of our vertiginous celebrity culture.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, author of Blonde

“As one of the founding editors at People, Lanny Jones helped chronicle and invent the rise of celebrity culture. In this fun and insightful book, he explores the difference between celebrities and heroes, a distinction that is more important than ever in our age of Kardashians and Trumps.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs

“As the editor of People magazine during its early glory days, Landon Jones was present at the creation of the Celebrity Nation. He brings a sharp eye and deep understanding—as well as warmth and humor—to exploring a phenomenon that once seemed like an entertaining diversion but now threatens to consume us all.”
—Evan Thomas, author of First: Sandra Day O’Connor and Road to Surrender

“The final arbiter of all matters celebrity in America.”
—former columnist Frank Rich, New York Times

“As a former editor of People magazine, Landon Jones is an expert on the rise of celebrity culture in this country and its troubling social costs. His mesmerizing book, revealing in unsettling detail how America’s addiction to celebrity has heightened its political and class divisions and weakened community and family ties, is a must-read.”
—Lynne Olson, author of Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples from Destruction

From the Publisher

03/01/2023

Jones (William Clark and the Shaping of the West) utilizes his background as the former managing editor of People magazine to probe how celebrity worship has shaped political and cultural landscapes, as well as individual lives. This is a well-researched, astute examination of the blurred lines between heroes and celebrities. The book's narrative and plot points are immensely readable, but perhaps a little too linear and thesis-driven for the shapeshifting nature of celebrities. The author rightly argues that people are made and unmade by the willingness to do anything for fame, and many often lose their humanness and transform from enviable into exorable. The book covers a vast amount of ground and draws on a mix of academic studies and less scholarly sources to showcase the ubiquity of fame and its impact. The end result is a fascinating look at a theoretical concept, made real by the examples the author is so deeply fluent in from his years at People. VERDICT Although the ending is a little too simplistic, this book could spark debate in university classrooms or at dinner tables, where the abundance of celebrities and celebrity podcasts suits U.S. tastes as much as apple pie.—Emily Bowles

Library Journal

2023-01-19
Why the adulation of celebrities is a recipe for social decay.

One of the most eye-popping facts in this book is that Kim Kardashian has 326 million followers on Instagram as of September 2022. This simple data point shows the level that celebrity culture—i.e., being famous mainly for being famous—has reached in the U.S. and the world. Jones is a former editor of People magazine, a publication that played a role in building the celebrity machine, although now he has a jaundiced view of the whole business. The author identifies Elizabeth Taylor as one of the first to turn her life into a curated performance. After she stopped making movies, she generated millions of dollars in endorsements and eventually her own product line, which set a pattern for future generations. The big change, notes Jones, came with the social media revolution and the scale it provided. “The marriage of social media with celebrity culture was made in branding heaven,” he writes. “Just as the broad reach of television had once overshadowed the traditional legacy print media, so too did social media offer unparalleled reach, frequency, and intimacy, especially to younger consumers.” Paris Hilton was one of the first to grasp the potential of social media and understood that even the occasional scandal could be good for business. There were a host of imitators, and the formula worked best if it included a touch of vulnerability, which helped the manufactured image of authenticity. Jones points to surveys showing that many teenagers count being famous as their life goal, which underlines how celebrities have elbowed aside people of actual accomplishment. A few celebrities have used their profiles and wealth for good works. Jones hopes that this will become more common, but he doesn’t sound convinced. However, the author provides a solid examination of how we got here.

A disquieting, well-researched exploration of the celebrity phenomenon and its consequences for our society.

Kirkus Reviews