Terry Teachout's thought-provoking observations on everyone from Louis Armstrong to The Sopranos, and on everything from American opera to serials on TV. Terry Teachout, one of our most acute cultural commentators, here turns his sharp eye to every corner of the arts world--music, dance, literature, theater, film, TV, and the visual arts. This collection gathers the best of Teachout's writings from the past fifteen years. In each essay he offers lucid and balanced judgments that invariably illuminate, sometimes infuriate, and always spark a response--the mark of a critic whose thoughts, however controversial, cannot be ignored. In a thoughtful introduction to the book, Teachout considers how American culture of the twenty-first century differs from that of the last century and how the information age has altered popular culture. His selected essays chronicle America's cultural journey over the past decade and a half, and they show us what has been lost--and gained--along the way. With highly informed opinions, an inimitable wit and style, and a genuine devotion to all things cultural, Teachout offers his readers much to delight in and much to ponder.

Whittaker Chambers is one of the most controversial figures in modern American history a former Communist spy who left the party, testified against Alger Hiss before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and wrote a classic autobiography, Witness. Dismissed by some as a crank, reviled by others as a traitor, Chambers still looms as a Dostoevskian figure over three decades after his death in 1961. A man of profound pessimism, rare vision, and remarkable literary talents, his continuing importance was attested to when Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1984. Ghosts on the Roof, originally published in 1989, brings together more than fifty short stories, essays, articles, and reviews that originally appeared in Time, Life, National Review, Commonweal, The American Mercury, and the New Masses. Included are essays on Karl Marx, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, George Santayana, Dame Rebecca West, Ayn Rand, and Greta Garbo. These show Chambers at his best, as a peerless historian of ideas.

Whittaker Chambers is one of the most controversial figures in modern American history a former Communist spy who left the party, testified against Alger Hiss before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and wrote a classic autobiography, "Witness." Dismissed by some as a crank, reviled by others as a traitor, Chambers still looms as a Dostoevskian figure over three decades after his death in 1961. A man of profound pessimism, rare vision, and remarkable literary talents, his continuing importance was attested to when Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1984. "Ghosts on the Roof," originally published in 1989, brings together more than fifty short stories, essays, articles, and reviews that originally appeared in "Time, Life, National Review, Commonweal, The American Mercury," and the New Masses. Included are essays on Karl Marx, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, George Santayana, Dame Rebecca West, Ayn Rand, and Greta Garbo. These show Chambers at his best, as a peerless historian of ideas.

Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century and a giant of modern American culture. He knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts, wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies - without a collaborator - and created collages that have been compared to the art of Romare Bearden. The ranks of his admirers included Johnny Cash, Jackson Pollock and Orson Welles. Offstage he was witty, introspective and unexpectedly complex, a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and more sharp-edged than his worshipping fans ever knew."

Wall Street Journal" arts columnist Terry Teachout has drawn on a cache of important new sources unavailable to previous Armstrong biographers, including hundreds of private recordings of backstage and after-hours conversations that Armstrong made throughout the second half of his life, to craft a sweeping new narrative biography of this towering figure that shares full, accurate versions of such storied events as Armstrong's decision to break up his big band and his quarrel with President Eisenhower for the first time. Certain to be the definitive word on Armstrong for our generation, "Pops" paints a gripping portrait of the man, his world and his music that will stand alongside Gary Giddins' "Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams" and Peter Guralnick's "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley" as a classic biography of a major American musician.

"The Dud Avocado "follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, "The Dud Avocado" gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.
“I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed "The Dud Avocado." It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).” –Groucho Marx
"["The Dud Avocado"] is one of the best novels about growing up fast..." "-The Guardian"

The Wall Street Journal drama critic and Missouri native remembers growing up in small-town America, paying tribute to the memories he developed and people he met while revealing the reasons he finally left for New York City. In this collection of anecdotes and memories, Terry Teachout sings of the pride of regional America. City Limits is the story of Teachout's as he grew up in small town of Silkeston, Missouri, filled with countless adventures and embarrassments. Beginning with his life as a young boy and progressing to eventual his decision to leave the only place he knew for New York City, Teachout gives readers a glance into the mind of small-town boy that grew into a big-city man.

When H. L. Mencken talked, everyone listened -- like it or not. In the Roaring Twenties, he was the one critic who mattered, the champion of a generation of plain-speaking writers who redefined the American novel, and the ax-swinging scourge of the know-nothing, go-getting middle-class philistines whom he dubbed the "booboisie." Some loved him, others loathed him, but everybody read him. Now Terry Teachout takes on the man Edmund Wilson called "our greatest practicing literary journalist," brilliantly capturing all of Mencken's energy and erudition, passion and paradoxes, in a masterful biography of this iconoclastic figure and the world he shaped.