This book is a rocket ride from my childhood to the end of my dreams. The road has many pot holes filled with gut wrenching laughter and spiced with the bitter sweet memories of lost friendships. The road is not paved with gold but the black tears of unfinished lives. There are forks in the road that lead to complete terror and others to utter joy. It is at times impossible to separate the two; it is at times insanity. This is not a tale of a life well planned but one of being bucked off and climbing back on. It sometimes runs amok, but these friendships are made to be bent, never broken. Some of these friendships were forged in the fires of the hell called Vietnam. The best and worst things on life's road are those not expected. They can bring absolute joy and crushing sadness. So strap yourself to a chair and take a roller coaster ride with Pineapple, Woody, Mikey, Nick, and the wacky Nolans and all the others who climb aboard.

During America's Swing Era, no musician was more successful or controversial than Artie Shaw: the charismatic and opinionated clarinetist-bandleader whose dozens of hits became anthems for "the greatest generation." But some of his most beautiful recordings were not issued until decades after he'd left the scene. He broke racial barriers by hiring African American musicians. His frequent "retirements" earned him a reputation as the Hamlet of jazz. And he quit playing for good at the height of his powers. The handsome Shaw had seven wives (including Lana Turner and Ava Gardner). Inveterate reader and author of three books, he befriended the best-known writers of his time. Tom Nolan, who interviewed Shaw between 1990 and his death in 2004 and spoke with one hundred of his colleagues and contemporaries, captures Shaw and his era with candor and sympathy, bringing the master to vivid life and restoring him to his rightful place in jazz history. Originally published in hardcover under the title Three Chords for Beauty's Sake.

When he died in 1983, Ross Macdonald was the best-known and most highly regarded crime-fiction writer in America. Long considered the rightful successor to the mantles of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and his Lew Archer-novels were hailed by "The New York Times" as "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American."

Now, in the first full-length biography of this extraordinary and influential writer, a much fuller picture emerges of a man to whom hiding things came as second nature. While it was no secret that Ross Macdonald was the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar -- a Santa Barbara man married to another good mystery writer, Margaret Millar -- his official biography was spare. Drawing on unrestricted access to the Kenneth and Margaret Millar Archives, on more than forty years of correspondence, and on hundreds of interviews with those who knew Millar well, author Tom Nolan has done a masterful job of filling in the blanks between the psychologically complex novels and the author's life -- both secret and overt.

Ross Macdonald came to crime-writing honestly. Born in northern California to Canadian parents, Kenneth Millar grew up in Ontario virtually fatherless, poor, and with a mother whose mental stability was very much in question. From the age of twelve, young Millar was fighting, stealing, and breaking social and moral laws; by his own admission, he barely escaped being a criminal. Years later, Millar would come to see himself in his tales' wrongdoers. "I don't have to be violent," he said, "My books are."

How this troubled young man came to be one of the most brilliant graduate students in the history of the University of Michigan and howthis writer, who excelled in a genre all too often looked down upon by literary critics, came to have a lifelong friendship with Eudora Welty are all examined in the pages of Tom Nolan's meticulous biography. We come to a sympathetic understanding of the Millars' long, and sometimes rancorous, marriage and of their life in Santa Barbara, California, with their only daughter, Linda, whose legal and emotional traumas lie at the very heart of the story. But we also follow the trajectory of a literary career that began in the pages of "Manhunt" and ended with the great respect of such fellow writers as Marshall McLuhan, Hugh Kenner, Nelson Algren, and Reynolds Price, and the longtime distinguished publisher Alfred A. Knopf.

As "Ross Macdonald: A Biography" makes abundantly clear, Ross Macdonald's greatest character -- above and beyond his famous Lew Archer -- was none other than his creator, Kenneth Millar.

Revered by such contemporary masters as Sue Grafton, George Pelecanos, and James Ellroy, praised by Eudora Welty as oa more serious and complex writer than Chandler and Hammett ever were,o Ross Macdonald (the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar) brought to the crime novel a new realism and psychological depth and a unique gift for intricately involving mystery narratives. Now, the Library of America presents its three-volume Macdonald edition in a deluxe collector's edition boxed set. Here are eleven classic novels, all featuring his incomparable protagonist, Southern California private investigator Lew Archer, in authoritative texts with notes by Macdonald's biographer Tom Nolan- Four Novels of the 1950s The Way Some People Die The Barbarous Coast The Doomsters The Galton Case Three Novels of the Early 1960s The Zebra-Striped Hearse The Chill The Far Side of the Dollar Four Later Novels Black Money The Instant Enemy The Goodbye Look The Underground Man

From his vantage point in Southern California--and through the eyes of his great creation, private eye Lew Archer--Ross Macdonald (the pseudonymn of Kenneth Millar) fashions a haunting, startlingly immediate vision of modern America: a swirling mix of sexual exploitation, intergenerational conflict, racial animosities, and ecological disaster. In Black Money, Archer is hired to find a wealthy man gone missing and soon finds himself investigating a suspicious seven-year-old suicide. The case becomes a peeling away of many levels of deception, delusion, and false identity. Exploring themes of immigration and border-crossing central to Macdonald's own life, Black Money also pays homage to The Great Gatsby, one of his favorite books. The Instant Enemy begins with Archer's search for a runaway teenage daughter and her troubled, possibly murderous boyfriend, a search that uncovers a morass of hidden wrongs. In an emotionally intense work that reflects the chaos and conflicts of his family's troubled past, Macdonald gives indelible and ultimately tragic expression to the generational conflict and drug culture of the DJHCs. An investigation into "a rather peculiar burglary" takes a drastic turn with the discovery of a body in an abandoned car on a beach in The Goodbye Look, the book that sealed Macdonald's reputation as the preeminent crime novelist of his time. Tracking a stolen heirloom, Archer follows a trail of violence that lays bare a miasma of buried secrets and unforgotten traumas. "In our day," wrote Eudora Welty, "it is for such a novel as The Underground Man that the detective form exists." A raging wildfire stirred by the Santa Ana winds serves as prelude to a chain of kidnapping and murder. Youthful rebellion is pitted against the hypocrisies of the older generation in a novel, in Welty's estimation, "not only exhilaratingly well done; it is also very moving."

This book is a rocket ride from my childhood to the end of my dreams. The road has many pot holes filled with gut wrenching laughter and spiced with the bitter sweet memories of lost friendships. The road is not paved with gold but the black tears of unfinished lives. There are forks in the road that lead to complete terror and others to utter joy. It is at times impossible to separate the two; it is at times insanity. This is not a tale of a life well planned but one of being bucked off and climbing back on. It sometimes runs amok, but these friendships are made to be bent, never broken. Some of these friendships were forged in the fires of the hell called Vietnam. The best and worst things on life's road are those not expected. They can bring absolute joy and crushing sadness. So strap yourself to a chair and take a roller coaster ride with Pineapple, Woody, Mikey, Nick, and the wacky Nolans and all the others who climb aboard.

The three novels collected in this second volume in the Library of America RossMacdonald edition represent for many readers the summit of American crime writing.They remain thrilling for their searing psychological truth-telling, daring flights of narrative invention, and their keenlyobserved picture of the manners and morals of a particular time and place (Southern California in the early 1960s).Each reflects Macdonald s enduring concern with the hidden crimes and agonizing dysfunctions that haunt families fromone generation to the next. In The Zebra-Striped Hearse, a father s attempt to protect his daughter from the completeand utter personal disaster of marriage to a troubled drifter sends private detective Lew Archer on a perplexing and increasinglybloody trail that leads him from Mexico to Lake Tahoe and finally into the maze of a tragically splinteredidentity. In The Chill, the search for a young bride gone missing uncovers a succession of seemingly unrelated crimes committedover a period of decades, as Archer finds himself a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past. Another hunt for a missing person this time a young man escaped from an elite reform school provides the impetusfor The Far Side of the Dollar, which Macdonald s friend Eudora Welty considered securely among your strongest andbest . . . a beauty that just gets better. "

During America's Swing Era, no musician was more successful or controversial than Artie Shaw: the charismatic and opinionated clarinetist-bandleader whose dozens of hits became anthems for "the greatest generation." But some of his most beautiful recordings were not issued until decades after he'd left the scene. He broke racial barriers by hiring African American musicians. His frequent "retirements" earned him a reputation as the Hamlet of jazz. And he quit playing for good at the height of his powers. The handsome Shaw had seven wives (including Lana Turner and Ava Gardner). Inveterate reader and author of three books, he befriended the best-known writers of his time. Tom Nolan, who interviewed Shaw between 1990 and his death in 2004 and spoke with one hundred of his colleagues and contemporaries, captures Shaw and his era with candor and sympathy, bringing the master to vivid life and restoring him to his rightful place in jazz history.