Martin Torgoff

For more than three decades, Martin Torgoff has been at the forefront of major media trends and cultural currents, documenting and telling the story of America through the evolution of its popular culture. An award-winning journalist, author of prize-winning and best-selling books, documentary filmmaker and Emmy-nominated television writer, director and producer of shows that have been seen by millions, his work has encompassed music, art, film, theater, literature, politics, history, biography, sexuality, sports, sociology, and celebrity culture. As the New Yorker put it, “Martin Torgoff has been writing books and making films about sex, drugs and rock and roll for thirty years.”

Although an expert on the cultural landscape of the baby boom

If you like author Martin Torgoff here is the list of authors you may also like

Buy books on Amazon

Total similar authors (26)

Simon Baatz

Simon Baatz received his PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania. He now teaches legal history at John Jay College in New York.

Q & A with Simon Baatz about Girl on the Velvet Swing.
What attracted you to this subject?
It’s a sensational story that resonates with recent events in our own time. A sixteen-year-old girl arrives in New York and meets a wealthy, influential man three times her age. Stanford White lures Evelyn Nesbit to his apartment on a pretext, drugs her and sexually assaults her. Four years later she marries a millionaire playboy, Harry Thaw, who shoots and kills White in a crowded theatre. What could be more sensational than that?

What was most enjoyable about your research?
There were 14 daily newspapers in New York
Buy books on Amazon
Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton emerged as one of America’s most insightful novelists, deftly exposing the tensions between societal expectation and personal desire through her vivid portrayals of upper-class life. Drawing from her deep familiarity with New York’s privileged “aristocracy,” she offered readers a keenly observed and piercingly honest vision of Gilded Age society.
Her work reached a milestone when she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence. This novel highlights the constraining rituals of 1870s New York society and remains a defining portrait of elegance laced with regret.
Wharton’s literary achievements span a wide canvas. The House of Mirth presents a tragic, vividly drawn character s
Buy books on Amazon
Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as
Buy books on Amazon
Margaret Craven

Margaret was the daughter of Arthur J. Craven, a lawyer, and Emily K. Craven. After she and her twin Wilson were born, her family, including an older brother, Leslie (born 1889), moved from Montana to Bellingham, Washington. After finishing high school in Bellingham, Margaret went to Stanford University (Palo Alto, California) where she majored in history and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
Upon graduating with distinction in 1924, she moved to San Jose, California, where she was secretary to the managing editor of the Mercury Herald. Soon she began writing the editorials. After the death of the editor, Margaret moved back to Palo Alto and began writing short stories for magazines like the Delineator. When her father died, her mother came to live
Buy books on Amazon
Herman Melville

There is more than one author with this name

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a mer
Buy books on Amazon
Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and num
Buy books on Amazon
Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the Southern United States. Her other novels have similar themes. Most are set in the Deep South.
McCullers's work is often described as Southern Gothic and indicative of her Southern roots. Critics also describe her writing and eccentric characters as universal in scope. Her stories have been adapted to stage and film. A stage adaptation of her novel The Member of the Wedding (1946), which captures a young girl's feelings at her brother's wedding, made a successful Broadway run in 1950–51.
Buy books on Amazon
Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program i
Buy books on Amazon
Kenneth Womack

Kenneth Womack is a world-renowned authority on the Beatles and their enduring cultural influence. His latest book project involves a two-volume, full-length biography devoted to famed Beatles producer Sir George Martin.

Womack's Beatles-related books include Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of the Beatles (2007), The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles (2009), and The Beatles Encyclopedia: Everything Fab Four (2014).

Womack is also the author of four novels, including John Doe No. 2 and the Dreamland Motel (2010), The Restaurant at the End of the World (2012), Playing the Angel (2013), and I Am Lemonade Lucy! (2019).
Buy books on Amazon
Simone de Beauvoir

Works of Simone de Beauvoir, French writer, existentialist, and feminist, include The Second Sex in 1949 and The Coming of Age , a study in 1970 of views of different cultures on the old.

Simone de Beauvoir, an author and philosopher, wrote novels, monographs, political and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography. People now best know She Came to Stay and The Mandarins , her metaphysical novels. Her treatise, a foundational contemporary tract, of 1949 detailed analysis of oppression of women.
Buy books on Amazon
Fannie Flagg

Fannie Flagg began writing and producing television specials at age nineteen and went on to distinguish herself as an actress and writer in television, films, and the theater. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (which was produced by Universal Pictures as "Fried Green Tomatoes"), Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, Standing in the Rainbow, and A Redbird Christmas.

Flagg’s film script for "Fried Green Tomatoes" was nominated for both the Academy Award and the Writers Guild of America Award and won the highly regarded Scripters Award. She lives in California and Alabama.
Buy books on Amazon
Shawn Levy

Shawn Levy is the author of eleven books of biography, pop culture history, and poetry. The former film critic of The Oregonian and KGW-TV and a former editor of American Film, he has been published in Sight and Sound, Film Comment, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Black Rock Beacon, among many other outlets. He jumps and claps and sings for victory in Portland, Oregon, where he serves on the board of directors of Operation Pitch Invasion.
Buy books on Amazon
Joyce Johnson

Born Joyce Glassman to a Jewish family in Queens, New York, Joyce was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, just around the corner from the apartment of William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer Burroughs. Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac were frequent visitors to Burroughs' apartment.

At the age of 13, Joyce rebelled against her controlling parents and began hanging out in Washington Square. She matriculated at Barnard College at 16, failing her graduation by one class. It was at Barnard that she became friends with Elise Cowen (briefly Allen Ginsberg's lover) who introduced her to the Beat circle. Ginsberg arranged for Glassman and Kerouac to meet on a blind date.

Joyce was married briefly to abstract painter James Johnson, who was killed in a
Buy books on Amazon
Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman) is an American singer-songwriter, author, musician, poet, and, of late, disc jockey who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest. A number of his songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems of the anti-war and civil rights movements. His most recent studio album, Modern Times, released on August 29, 2006, entered the U.S. album charts at #1, making him, at age sixty five, the oldest living person to top those charts.

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature (2016).
Buy books on Amazon
Carl Sagan

In 1934, scientist Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. After earning bachelor and master's degrees at Cornell, Sagan earned a double doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1960. He became professor of astronomy and space science and director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, and co-founder of the Planetary Society. A great popularizer of science, Sagan produced the PBS series, "Cosmos," which was Emmy and Peabody award-winning, and was watched by 500 million people in 60 countries. A book of the same title came out in 1980, and was on The New York Times bestseller list for 7 weeks. Sagan was author, co-author or editor of 20 books, including The Dragons of Eden (1977), which won a Pulitzer, Pale Blue Dot (1
Buy books on Amazon
James C. Scott

James C. Scott was an American political scientist and anthropologist specializing in comparative politics. He was a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies, subaltern politics, and anarchism.
Buy books on Amazon
Knut Hamsun

Novels of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (born Knud Pedersen), include Hunger (1890) and The Growth of the Soil (1917). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920.

He insisted on the intricacies of the human mind as the main object of modern literature to describe the "whisper of the blood, and the pleading of the bone marrow." Hamsun pursued his literary program, debuting in 1890 with the psychological novel Hunger.
Buy books on Amazon
Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar, born Julio Florencio Cortázar Descotte, was an Argentine author of novels and short stories. He influenced an entire generation of Latin American writers from Mexico to Argentina, and most of his best-known work was written in France, where he established himself in 1951.
Buy books on Amazon
Percival Everett

Percival L. Everett (born 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.

The Washington Post has called Everett “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.” And according to The Boston Globe, “He’s literature’s NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straigh
Buy books on Amazon
Thornton Wilder

Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.

For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton...
Buy books on Amazon
Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith has won the Los Angeles Times' Ray Bradbury Prize, the Society of Authors' ADCI Literary Prize, the Washington State Book Award (twice), the Nebula Award, the Otherwise/James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the World Fantasy Award, Premio Italia, Lambda Literary Award (6 times), and others. She is also the co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of anthologies. Her newest novels are Hild and So Lucky. Her Aud Torvingen novels are soonn to be rereleased in new editions. She lives in Seattle with her wife, writer Kelley Eskridge, where she's working on the sequel to Hild, Menewood.

Series:
* Aud Torvingen
Buy books on Amazon
Simon Baatz

Simon Baatz received his PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania. He now teaches legal history at John Jay College in New York.

Q & A with Simon Baatz about Girl on the Velvet Swing.
What attracted you to this subject?
It’s a sensational story that resonates with recent events in our own time. A sixteen-year-old girl arrives in New York and meets a wealthy, influential man three times her age. Stanford White lures Evelyn Nesbit to his apartment on a pretext, drugs her and sexually assaults her. Four years later she marries a millionaire playboy, Harry Thaw, who shoots and kills White in a crowded theatre. What could be more sensational than that?

What was most enjoyable about your research?
There were 14 daily newspapers in New York
Buy books on Amazon
Sarah Bakewell

Sarah Bakewell was a bookseller and a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart, The English Dane, and the best-selling How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. In addition to writing, she now teaches in the Masters of Studies in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. She lives in London.
Buy books on Amazon
William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs II, (also known by his pen name William Lee) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer.
A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century".
His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays.
Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearance
Buy books on Amazon
Mary McMyne

Mary McMyne is the author of the novels The Book of Gothel and A Rose by Any Other Name. Her fairytale poetry chapbook, Wolf Skin, won the Elgin Chapbook Award. A graduate of the NYU MFA program, she has received the Faulkner-Wisdom Prize for a Novel-in-Progress and a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, among other honors. She is the poetry editor for Enchanted Living. Find her across social media as @MaryMcMyne.
Buy books on Amazon
Tim Alberta

Tim Alberta is chief political correspondent for Politico Magazine, and has reported for National Review, National Journal, The Hotline, and the Wall Street Journal.
Buy books on Amazon