Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews

A biography of the great film noir actor

BOOK REVIEWS


Library Journal
Dana Andrews (1909–92) was an overlooked, underrated actor, despite performances in classic 1940s films such as The Best Years of Our Lives, Laura, The Ox-Bow Incident, and Elia Kazan’s Boomerang! Rollyson (journalist, Baruch Coll., CUNY; Biography: A User’s Guide) describes Andrews as a master at portraying “conflicted emotion,” whose adoption of a “male mask” made him ideally suited to film noir. Unfortunately, this mask also concealed his addiction to alcohol, which increasingly limited his career, ultimately leading to parts in shoddy B-films, dinner theater, and even a role in a television soap opera. Rollyson tells a sympathetic account of a decent, hardworking actor who championed liberal causes (though his minister father supported the Ku Klux Klan), fought Hollywood’s blacklist, and brought reforms in his stint as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Finally, with great effort, Andrews overcame alcoholism and served as an advocate and public face for education and understanding of this debilitating illness.
Verdict Drawing on access to Andrews’s family and his extensive personal archives, this biography provides an admiring but unflinching look at Andrews’s life and career. Recommended for fans of Hollywood’s Golden Age. [This is the Turner Classic Movie channel’s September Book of the Month.—Ed.]—Stephen Rees, formerly with Levittown Lib., PA


Selected Works: Click on titles for reviews

A riveting examination of Amy Lowell’s private life and lover, Ada Russell, who did so much to make Lowell’s career possible The startling discovery of a new Amy Lowell lover who perished on the Lusitania. A compelling window into Lowell’s gregarious character. Concise readings of Lowell’s most important poems reveal the depth and range of her erotic imagination. An astute analysis of the way biographers and critics have maligned Lowell as a person and poet.
A revisionist view of the poet, her fellow writers, and their biographers
The first biography of the great film noir actor
Here, at last, is the true story of Sylvia Plath's last days and her estate's efforts to shape her husband's role in her death and the world's understanding of Plath and her work. Here, too, is a new Sylvia Plath, immersed in popular culture and proto-feminism, presaging the way we live now.
The first biography that truly shows the actress at work.-- Ellen Burstyn Forthcoming in a new edition from University Press of Mississippi.
America's most controversial radical playwright
The first biography of Gellhorn, relying on key archival sources and interviews with her friends and associates.
Delves beneath the surface to examine the forces that made Sontag an international icon, exploring her public persona and private passions, including the strategies behind her meteoric rise to fame and her political moves.
The first book to survey the broad range of Sontag's work.
Twenty-five years of writing about female icons and biography.
The standard biography of one of the 20th century's greatest prose stylists
The first book to explore the entire corpus of her extraordinary career.
Religion, politics, and the writing of biographies.
Filmmaker, feminist,, wife--a twentieth century woman.
The first literary biography of Norman Mailer, updated and revised
For those addicted to reading biography, enhancing their pleasure by providing insight (or you might say, the inside word) on how biographies are put together.
Provocative reviews of American subjects, originally appearing in The New York Sun.
A candid and revealing account, by an expert in the minefield of the biographer’s contentious work
A terrific companion for biography writers and lovers.-- James McGrath Morris, editor of the monthly "The Biographer's Craft"
Essays in Biography is a play on words conveying an attempt to explore the nature of biography in pieces about the history of the genre and in portrayals of biographers (Plutarch, Leon Edel, and W. A. Swanberg), literary figures (Lillian Hellman, Jack London), philosophers and critics (Leo Strauss and Hippolyte Taine), political figures (Winston Churchill and Napoleon), and artists (Rembrandt and Rubens).

Columns, Book Reviews, Editing Projects, and Archives