New York Life: Of Friends and Others - Softcover

Gill, Brendan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671748017 ISBN 13: 9780671748012

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1991

From the 1930s to the 1990s, from backstage Broadway to the Century Club, a long-time New York observer offers a tour through the heady ranks of New York's elite

From Publishers Weekly:

Ranging in length from three pages (a piece on Padraic Colum) to 22 (Georges Simenon), these 41 genial articles elegantly recall 45 friends and acquaintances of New Yorker staff writer Gill. An Irish Catholic, he writes with wit and charm of Brendan Behan, Philip Barry, Eugene O'Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O'Hara, and equally appreciatively of Al Hirschfeld, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., Louise Nevelson, Dorothy Parker, Man Ray and Ben Sonnenberg. Gill's diverse circle encompasses as well architects William Adams Delano and Wallace K. Harrison, photographers Walker Evans and Andre Kertesz, comedians Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, writers Joseph Alsop, Maxwell Anderson, John Betjeman and Alec Waugh, impresario Ellen Stewart, grand dame Eleanor Roosevelt. Also included is Gill's notorious New Yorker piece about Joseph Campbell's anti-Semitism and championing of right-wing anti-humanitarianism. Drawings not seen by PW.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

This amusing and intelligent volume of reminiscences offers a personal look at some of the 20th century's most successful writers, artists, and architects. Gill, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of several books, has been present on the New York art scene for decades and seems to have known nearly every important artist or intellectual who lived or visited there, from Joseph Alsop to Louise Nevelson. In this collection of 45 vignettes, Gill is frank and witty, yet sometimes critical, such as when he accuses Joseph Campbell of having bigoted and ultra-conservative views. This book provides entertaining reading for those wishing an intimate, backstage glimpse of Gill's famous friends and acquaintances. Recommended for general audiences.
-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.