Edie: American Girl - Softcover

Stein, Jean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802134106 ISBN 13: 9780802134103

Publisher: Grove Press, 1994

Synopsis

When Edie was first published, it quickly became an international bestseller and then took its place among the classic books about the 1960s. Edie Sedgwick exploded into the public eye like a comet. She seemed to have it all: she was aristocratic and glamorous, vivacious and young, Andy Warhol’s superstar. But within a few years she flared out as quickly as she had appeared, and before she turned twenty-nine she was dead from a drug overdose.

In a dazzling tapestry of voices family, friends, lovers, rivals the entire meteoric trajectory of Edie Sedgwick’s life is brilliantly captured. And so is the Pop Art world of the 60s: the sex, drugs, fashion, music the mad rush for pleasure and fame. All glitter and flash on the outside, it was hollow and desperate within like Edie herself, and like her mentor, Andy Warhol. Alternately mesmerizing, tragic, and horrifying, this book shattered many myths about the 60s experience in America.

About this title

About the Author

Jean Stein has worked as an editor for a number of magazines, including The Paris Review and Esquire. She is co-author, with George Plimpton, of American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy and in 1990 she became the editor of the literary journal Grand Street, until it ended in 2004. It was described by The New York Times as 'one of the most revered literary magazines of the postwar era'. George Plimpton was an author, an actor and a literary patron. In 1953 he co-founded The Paris Review and his books, including Out of My League, Paper Lion, Mad Ducks and Bears, One More July, Shadow Box, The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair, Truman Capote and The Bogey Man. He died in September 2003.

Review

This is the book of the Sixties that we have been waiting for.” Norman Mailer

Extraordinary . . . a fascinating narrative that is both meticulously reported and expertly orchestrated.” Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

The ultimate oral history and still the most objectively cool book I’ve ever read. It’s perfectly structured and the most important book about America in the 1960s.”—Sloane Crosley, T: The New York Times Style Magazine

An exceptionally seductive biography. . . . You can’t put it down. . . . It has novelistic excitement.” Los Angeles Times Book Review

Jean Stein’s 1982 book Edie: American Girl, edited with George Plimpton . . . gave oral history the particular shimmer that comes when lofty literary aims happen to coincide with sheer entertainment value . . . Edie gave an almost mythic quality to its subject’s persona and her brief rise and fall, yet in its telling you could also follow clear lines connecting disparate pieces of 20th-century American life: the hollow cult of celebrity; the fragile prospect of greater opportunity for women; the intoxicating dream of the West for certain Easterners; the peculiar pathologies of the very rich.” Maria Russo, New York Times Book Review

Through a kaleidoscope of seemingly fragmented voices, patterns form, giving brilliant definition to the very American tragedy of Edie Sedgwick, a woman . . . not likely to be forgotten after this haunting portrait.” Publishers Weekly

What makes this book so unusual, unique almost, is the picture it paints of the New York counterculture. No one has ever done it better.” Atlanta Journal & Constitution

Is anyone capable of picking up . . . Edie and putting it down before the very last page?” Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review

There is no more classic summertime read.” New York Magazine

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0802134106
• ISBN 13: 9780802134103
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 564
• Editor: Plimpton George