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Overview
The long-awaited republication of this captivating account of the star's life.Louise Brooks left Wichita, Kansas, for New York City at age fifteen and lived the kind of life of which legends are made. From her beginnings as a dancer to her years in Hollywood, Berlin, and beyond, she was hailed and reviled as a new type of woman: independent, intellectually daring, and sexually free. In this widely acclaimed, first and only comprehensive biography, Barry Paris traces Brooks's trajectory from her childhood through her fall into obscurity and subsequent "resurrection" as a brilliant writer and enduring film icon.
"Star biographies don't get any better than Barry Paris's Louise Brooks." USA Today
"This account has the aphrodisiac gloss of Brooks herself: you meet the stare of a modern icon, a picture that taunts your inability to touch the real thing. A necessary and stimulating book, it is itself an important part of Brooks's life after death." The New Republic
"Absorbing, wonderfully well researched and, all in all, an exemplar of its kind." London Spectator
"Louise Brooks is not simply a summary of her movie plots and love affairs but a serious work of film and social history." New York Magazine
Barry Paris is an award-winning biographer, film and music critic, and contributor to the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other publications. He lives in Pittsburgh.
Translation Inquiries: Alfred A. Knopf
Synopsis
The long-awaited republication of this captivating account of the star's life.
Louise Brooks left Wichita, Kansas, for New York City at age fifteen and lived the kind of life of which legends are made. From her beginnings as a dancer to her years in Hollywood, Berlin, and beyond, she was hailed and reviled as a new type of woman: independent, intellectually daring, and sexually free. In this widely acclaimed, first and only comprehensive biography, Barry Paris traces Brooks's trajectory from her childhood through her fall into obscurity and subsequent "resurrection" as a brilliant writer and enduring film icon.
"Star biographies don't get any better than Barry Paris's Louise Brooks." USA Today
"This account has the aphrodisiac gloss of Brooks herself: you meet the stare of a modern icon, a picture that taunts your inability to touch the real thing. A necessary and stimulating book, it is itself an important part of Brooks's life after death." The New Republic
"Absorbing, wonderfully well researched and, all in all, an exemplar of its kind." London Spectator
"Louise Brooks is not simply a summary of her movie plots and love affairs but a serious work of film and social history." New York Magazine
Barry Paris is an award-winning biographer, film and music critic, and contributor to the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other publications. He lives in Pittsburgh.
Translation Inquiries: Alfred A. Knopf
Premiere Magazine
The much-talked-about Louise Brooks is among the worthiest Hollywood bios of the year: a synthesis of exhaustive research, written with imaginative sympathy.
Editorials
Greil Marcus
Paris is superb, every detail opening onto another plane or almost subliminally doubling back to an incident charted a hundred pages earlier, the full weight of Brook's exile coming home with increasing power, right to the end of her life. The second half of the book is riveting: complex, subtle, noisy, finally quiet. You don¹t care that Paris can't solve the mystery. You care that a woman lived a life that made it.—California Magazine
John Simon
Paris has researched and reported faithfully every aspect of Brooks¹s life. The story he tells is fascinating not only for what it says about Brooks, but also for its generous sidelights on the whole jazz-and-flapper age.—The Washington Post
Leonard Maltin
Unquestionably the film biography of the year is Barry Paris's Louise Brooks great, provocative reading.—Leonard Maltin, ABC-TV Entertainment Tonight
Liz Smith
A sensational work‹it's a wow!— New York Daily News