Bing Crosby's innovations as recording artist, actor, businessman, and radio and television performer. A multidisciplinary exploration, plus personal testimony from family members and colleagues. Going My Way: Bing Crosby and American Culture is the first serious study of the singer/actor's art and of his centrality to the history of twentieth-century popular music, film, and the entertainment industry. The volume uses a wide range of scholarly and cultural perspectives to explore Crosby's unique and lasting achievements. It also includes tributes and reminiscences from Bing's widow Kathryn, his grandson Steve, his record producer Ken Barnes, and one of his most popular successors, Michael Feinstein. Other contributors include Gary Giddins, the author of a widely acclaimed recent biography of the singer, and Will Friedwald, the acknowledged expert on the developmentof the "great American songbook." In addition to studying Bing Crosby's innovations and remarkable achievements as a recording artist, Going My Way explores his accomplishments as an actor, businessman, and radio and television performer. Going My Way makes an impressive case not only for Crosby's considerable talent and inimitable style, but also for his raising the quality of popular singing to the level of art. Contributors: Ken Barnes, Samuel L. Chell, Kathryn Crosby, Steven C. Crosby, John Mark Dempsey, Bernard F. Dick, Deborah Dolan, Michael Feinstein, Will Friedwald, Jeanne Fuchs, Gary Giddins, Peter Hammar, M. Thomas Inge, Malcolm MacFarlane, Eric Michael Mazur, Martin McQuade, Elaine Anderson Phillips, Ruth Prigozy, Walter Raubicheck, Linda A. Robinson, Stephen C. Shafer, David White, F.W. Wiggins Ruth Prigozy is Professor of English at Hofstra University. Walter Raubicheck is Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Pace University.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, has frequently been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre, a transitional work from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to the masterful critique of American aspiration in The Great Gatsby The Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood, the "bright young things" novel in which spoiled and wealthy characters succumb to decay because of their privilege and lack of purpose. Set between 1913 and 1922, Fitzgerald's longest novel touches on many of the decisive issues that mark the passage from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era into the Jazz Age: conspicuous consumption, income inequality, yellow journalism, the Great War, the rise of the movie industry, automobile travel, Wall Street stock scams, immigration and xenophobia, and the fixation with youth and aging. Published to coincide with the novel's centennial in 2022, this collection approaches The Beautiful and Damned for its insights more than its faults. Prominent Fitzgerald scholars analyze major themes and reveal unappreciated issues with attention to history, biography, literary influence, gender studies, and narratology. While acknowledging the novel's shortcomings, the essayists illustrate that The Beautiful and Damned has much more to say about its milieu than previously recognized. This collection provides a guide for understanding Fitzgerald's aims while demonstrating the richness of ideas that this novel explores, alongside the anxieties and ambitions that reverberate within it.

"Scripting Hitchcock" explores the collaborative process between Alfred Hitchcock and the screenwriters he hired to write the scripts for three of his greatest films: "Psycho, The Birds, " and "Marnie." Drawing from extensive interviews with the screenwriters and other film technicians who worked for Hitchcock, Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick illustrate how much of the filmmaking process took place not on the set or in front of the camera, but in the adaptation of the sources, the mutual creation of plot and characters by the director and the writers, and the various revisions of the written texts of the films. Hitchcock allowed his writers a great deal of creative freedom, which resulted in dynamic screenplays that expanded traditional narrative and defied earlier conventions. Critically examining the question of authorship in film, Raubicheck and Srebnick argue that Hitchcock did establish visual and narrative priorities for his writers, but his role in the writing process was that of an editor. While the writers and their contributions have generally been underappreciated, this study reveals that all the dialogue and much of the narrative structure of the films were the work of screenwriters Jay Presson Allen, Joseph Stefano, and Evan Hunter. The writers also shaped American cultural themes into material specifically for actors such as Janet Leigh, Tippi Hedren, and Tony Perkins. This volume gives due credit to those writers who gave narrative form to Hitchcock's filmic vision.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, has frequently been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre, a transitional work from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to the masterful critique of American aspiration in The Great Gatsby. The Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood, the "bright young things" novel in which spoiled and wealthy characters succumb to decay because of their privilege and lack of purpose. Set between 1913 and 1922, Fitzgerald's longest novel touches on many of the decisive issues that mark the passage from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era into the Jazz Age: conspicuous consumption, income inequality, yellow journalism, the Great War, the rise of the movie industry, automobile travel, Wall Street stock scams, immigration and xenophobia, and the fixation with youth and aging. Published to coincide with the novel's centennial in 2022, this collection approaches The Beautiful and Damned for its insights more than its faults. Prominent Fitzgerald scholars analyze major themes and reveal unappreciated issues with attention to history, biography, literary influence, gender studies, and narratology. While acknowledging the novel's shortcomings, the essayists illustrate that The Beautiful and Damned has much more to say about its milieu than previously recognized. This collection provides a guide for understanding Fitzgerald's aims while demonstrating the richness of ideas that this novel explores, alongside the anxieties and ambitions that reverberate within it.

Five of Hitchcock's most significant films were unavailable to the public for as long as two decades before their release in 1983-84. This highly readable volume collects the most important essays written about Hitchcock and the rereleased films since that time. Covering the entire range of contemporary film criticism and theory, these studies demonstrate Hitchcock's centrality to an understanding of how culture shapes film and how film shapes, and even creates culture.