The man who created the boldest hard boiled fiction, Dashiell Hammett, wrote The Thin Man in 1933 and launched the fun-loving, booze-swilling, mystery-solving couple Nick and Nora Charles into American culture. MGM sold millions of movie tickets casting William Powell and Myrna Loy as this classiest of romantic couples. Over 14 years and six films, these stars navigated the grave periods of history: the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. The novel and films live on as gems of a unique gritty sophistication. This complete history of The Thin Man series covers the brightest stars, tastiest scandals, headlines and conflicts behind these classic films. With a cast of hundreds, we see Hammett, his lover Lillian Hellman, and their friend Dorothy Parker fight alcoholism, sexual convention and Senator Joe McCarthy in culture wars of eerie contemporaneity.

Nominated for Pulitzer, Tony and Obie awards, among others, Lee Blessing has shaped American theater over the last 40 years. Tackling subjects like child abuse, racism, sexism and war, as well as baseball, love and religion, Blessing has dedicated himself to investigating and dramatizing both the triumphs and evils of contemporary society. This book examines for the first time all 45 of his plays, along with one of his unpublished scripts, providing a definitive text on a playwright whose thought-provoking work has been performed around the world.

Tells the fist person story of Verne Lyon, an Iowa farm boy away at college who is inducted into the CIA to spy on his professors and fellow student as part of MHCHAOS, the then largest domestic surveillance program in American history. Framed by his handlers for an airport bombing the young Lyon is dispatched to Cuba to subvert the Castro regime and, when he balks at increasingly nefarious dirty tricks and tries to quit, the CIA kidnaps him twice, finally returning him to American soil and Leavenworth Penitentiary. Today a free man, Lyon details his journey through CIA lies and deceit both to make amends and to reveal the secret workings of government all around us.