Stefan Kanfer

Stefan Kanfer is the author of fifteen books, including the bestselling biographies of show business icons: GROUCHO; BALL OF FIRE (Lucille Ball); SOMEBODY (Marlon Brando); and TOUGH WITHOUT A GUN (Humphrey Bogart). He has also written many social histories, among them THE LAST EMPIRE, about the De Beers diamond company, and STARDUST LOST, an account of the rise and fall of the Yiddish Theater in New York.

Kanfer also wrote two novels about World War II and served as the only journalist on the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. He was the first by-lined cinema critic for Time magazine, where he worked as writer and editor for more than two decades. He has been given many writing awards and was named a Literary Lion of the New York Publi

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Lucille Ball

Best known American actress Lucille Désirée Ball starred of the popular situation comedy I Love Lucy from 1951 to 1957.

Lucille Désirée Ball on film, television, stage and radio worked as model and film executive of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, and Here's Lucy. Lucille Ball during her lifetime of longest career of Hollywood. From the 1930s, she worked on movie and television for more than three decades to the 1970s.

Ball in 1929 landed work as a model and, using the stage name "Diane Belmont," later began her performing career on Broadway. She in many small movie roles in the 1930s played under contract for Radio-Keith-Orpheum pictures. People labeled her as the "queen of the Bs," referring to her many roles in B-films. Ball me
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Ian Fleming

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English writer, best known for his postwar James Bond series of spy novels. Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his father was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton, Sandhurst, and, briefly, the universities of Munich and Geneva, Fleming moved through several jobs before he started writing.
While working for Britain's Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War, Fleming was involved in planning Operation Goldeneye and in the planning and oversight of two intelligence units: 30 Assault
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Irvine Welsh

Probably most famous for his gritty depiction of a gang of Scottish Heroin addicts, Trainspotting (1993), Welsh focuses on the darker side of human nature and drug use. All of his novels are set in his native Scotland and filled with anti-heroes, small time crooks and hooligans. Welsh manages, however to imbue these characters with a sad humanity that makes them likable despite their obvious scumbaggerry. Irvine Welsh is also known for writing in his native Edinburgh Scots dialect, making his prose challenging for the average reader unfamiliar with this style.
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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.
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Anne Rice

Anne Rice (born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien) was a best-selling American author of gothic, supernatural, historical, erotica, and later religious themed books. Best known for The Vampire Chronicles, her prevailing thematic focus is on love, death, immortality, existentialism, and the human condition. She was married to poet Stan Rice for 41 years until his death in 2002. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history.

Anne Rice passed on December 11, 2021 due to complications from a stroke. She was eighty years old at the time of her death.

She uses the pseudonym Anne Rampling for adult-themed fiction (i.e., erotica) and A.N. Roquelaure for fiction featuring sexually explicit
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Eugene O'Neill

American playwright Eugene Gladstone O'Neill authored Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931 among his works; he won the Nobel Prize of 1936 for literature, and people awarded him his fourth Pulitzer Prize for Long Day's Journey into Night , produced in 1956.

He won his Nobel Prize "for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy." More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced the dramatic realism that Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg pioneered to Americans and first used true American vernacular in his speeches.

His plays involve characters, who, engaging in depraved behavior, inhabit the fringes
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Paul Theroux

Paul Edward Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work is The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), a travelogue about a trip he made by train from Great Britain through Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, through South Asia, then South-East Asia, up through East Asia, as far east as Japan, and then back across Russia to his point of origin. Although perhaps best known as a travelogue writer, Theroux has also published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast.

He is the father of Marcel and Louis Theroux, and the brother of Alexander and Peter. Justin Theroux is his nephew.
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Jerry Seinfeld

Jerome Allen "Jerry" Seinfeld (born April 29, 1954) is an American comedian, actor and writer, whose style is often described as observational comedy. He is best known for playing a semi-fictional version of himself in the situation comedy, Seinfeld, (1989-1998), which he co-created, helped write and, in the show's final two seasons, executive produced. In his first major foray back into the media since the finale of Seinfeld, he co-wrote and co-produced the film Bee Movie, also dubbing the title role of Barry B. Benson. In February 2009, it was announced that Jerry Seinfeld will be participating in a reality TV series tentatively called Marriage Ref on NBC. Jerry is rumored to work behind the scenes, mainly operating as creator and executi
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Marlon Brando

Marlon Brando, Jr. was an American movie star and political activist. "Unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema" according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Brando was one of only three professional actors, along with Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe, named by Time Magazine as one of its 100 Persons of the Century in 1999.

Brando had a significant impact on film acting, and was the foremost example of the "method" acting style. While he became notorious for his "mumbling" diction and exuding a raw animal magnetism, his mercurial performances were nonetheless highly regarded, and he is widely considered as one of the greatest and most influential actors of the 20th century. Director Martin Scorsese
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David S. Reynolds

David S. Reynolds is a Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the City University of New York. His works include the award-winning Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, Walt Whitman's America, and John Brown, Abolitionist. He lives on Long Island in New York.
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Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet was an Academy Award-winning American film director, with over 50 films to his name, including the critically acclaimed 12 Angry Men (1957), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976) and The Verdict (1982), all of which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director. He won an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2005, for his "brilliant services to screenwriters, performers, and the art of the motion picture".
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Lucille Ball

Best known American actress Lucille Désirée Ball starred of the popular situation comedy I Love Lucy from 1951 to 1957.

Lucille Désirée Ball on film, television, stage and radio worked as model and film executive of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, and Here's Lucy. Lucille Ball during her lifetime of longest career of Hollywood. From the 1930s, she worked on movie and television for more than three decades to the 1970s.

Ball in 1929 landed work as a model and, using the stage name "Diane Belmont," later began her performing career on Broadway. She in many small movie roles in the 1930s played under contract for Radio-Keith-Orpheum pictures. People labeled her as the "queen of the Bs," referring to her many roles in B-films. Ball me
Buy books on Amazon
Patrick Radden Keefe

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and The New York Review of Books. He received the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, for his story "A Loaded Gun," was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and is also the recipient of an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship at the New America Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Jeanine Basinger

Jeanine Basinger holds a BS and MS from South Dakota State University. She is a film historian, professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University and curator and founder of The Cinema Archives at Wesleyan University. In addition, she is a trustee emeritus of the American Film Institute, a member of the Steering Committee of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation, and one of the Board of Advisors for the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers.

She has appeared in several movie-related documentaries and completed audio commentaries on about a dozen classic films.
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Al Pacino

Alfredo James Pacino is an Academy Award-, Golden Globe-, Tony-, BAFTA-, Emmy- and SAG award-winning American film and stage actor and director, widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential actors of all time.

He is well-known for his roles as Michael Corleone in the The Godfather trilogy, Tony Montana in Scarface, Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, Frank Serpico in Serpico, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman, and Roy Cohn in Angels in America. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1992 for his role in Scent of a Woman after being nominated 7 times beforehand for various roles.
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Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Cyrillic: Иван Сергеевич Тургенев) was a novelist, poet, and dramatist, and now ranks as one of the towering figures of Russian literature. His major works include the short-story collection A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860), and Fathers and Sons (1862).

These works offer realistic, affectionate portrayals of the Russian peasantry and penetrating studies of the Russian intelligentsia who were attempting to move the country into a new age. His masterpiece, Fathers and Sons, is considered one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century.

Turgenev was a contemporary with Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. While these wrote about church and reli
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John Le Carré

John le Carré, the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England), was an English author of espionage novels. Le Carré had resided in St Buryan, Cornwall, Great Britain, for more than 40 years, where he owned a mile of cliff close to Land's End.
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Patrick Stewart

Sir Patrick Stewart, OBE is an English film, television, stage and voice actor, who has had a distinguished career on stage and screen. He is most widely known for his roles as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and its successor films, and as Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men film series.

Known for his strong and authoritative voice, Stewart has lent his voice to a number of projects, including audio books, animated films and series and video games.
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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
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Janet Reitman

Janet Reitman is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and the author of "Inside Scientology," (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, July 2011), which was based on her National Magazine Award-nominated story of the same name published in Rolling Stone in March, 2006. She is the first American journalist to publish a major book on Scientology, and the only writer to have charted its full history.

Reitman also covered the war in Iraq for Rolling Stone and has reported on a wide range of other topics, including the failure of US and international recovery efforts in post-earthquake Haiti; the Duke lacrosse scandal; the death of American aid worker Marla Ruzicka in Baghdad; and the national childhood obesity crisis. She has also reported extensively in
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E.T.A. Hoffmann

Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann, better known by his pen name E. T. A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann), was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. His stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's famous opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffman appears (heavily fictionalized) as the hero. He is also the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the famous ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppélia is based on two other stories that Hoffmann wrote, while Schumann's Kreisleriana is based on Hoffmann's character Johannes Kreisler.

Hoffmann's stories were very influential during the 19th century, and he is one of the major author
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Ashley Spencer

Ashley Spencer is a culture writer and reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, Vice, Vulture, and elsewhere. Disney High is her first book.
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Kathleen Brady

Kathleen Brady's newest biography is Francis and Clare The Struggles of the Saints of Assisi, which won a 2022 Catholic Media Association Award. Learn more at https://bit.ly/3lhXHsh. Her work appears in Commonweal, America, and National Catholic Reporter. Brady is also the author of the critically well-received Lucille, The Life of Lucille Ball, and is featured on the TCM 12-part podcast series on the famed comedienne. In recognition of her biography Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker Brady was named a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. She appears on the NPR Planet Money podcast on Standard Oil and Anti-Trust. The ABC-TV movie, A Passion for Justice, starring Jane Seymour, was based on Brady's research into the life of Mississ
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