Simon Louvish Bücher

'I used to be Snow White, but I drifted...' Drawing on unpublished material from Mae West's personal papers, acclaimed biographer Simon Louvish offers us the first comprehensive book on West's legendarily sassy life and work. He examines her early vaudeville career, her transgressive and controversial Broadway plays (such as Sex), and her film career. The book also tracks Mae's later career from the 1940s through the 1970s, with new material on her larger-than-life Las Vegas and nightclub acts, and fascinating insight into her life with her companion-till-death, Paul Novak. Louvish, having inspected reams of West's private writings, also provides a completely new perspective on her as an original writer and creator, and traces the origin and development of the famous 'Mae West quips'. This is certainly the first book to tell West's tale with verifiable accuracy, as one of the great showbiz sagas of the twentieth century. It is both a distinctively American and rambunctiously universal tale.

A study of one of the cinema's most famous artists, Charlie Chaplin, whose Tramp persona is famous the world over, even to those who have never seen his films.

It's a Gift is Norman McLeod's classic comedy of disasters, in which W.C. Fields plays a general-store proprietor who buys an orange-ranch by mail and transports his family to California. This study features a brief production history and detailed filmography.

Presents a portrait of the father of American slapstick--the iron worker-turned-actor who pioneered a dizzying vocabulary of on-camera gags, gaffes, and gyrations.

With a foreword by the actor, director, and playwright described as “the greatest living exponent of Groucho Marx’s material” by The New York Times, and text by the author of Monkey Business, a biography of the Marx Brothers, this bio brings the wisecracking, cigar-chomping, eyebrow-raising comedian to life on the page. Groucho discusses such issues as the film Duck Soup, the rules of comedy, the directors he worked with, and his talented brothers Harpo and Chico (“You know, of course, those two aren’t really acting when they play those scenes. They’re just being themselves.”).

An essential volume for understanding Charlie Chaplin’s body of work. An Everyman who expressed the defiant spirit of freedom, Charlie Chaplin was first lauded and later reviled in the America that made him Hollywood’s richest man. He was a figure of multiple paradoxes. Simon Louvish’s book looks afresh at the “mask behind the man.” Louvish charts the tale of the Tramp himself through his films, from the early Mack Sennett shorts through the major features (The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, et al.). He retrieves Chaplin as the iconic London street kid who carried the “surreal” antics of early British music hall triumphantly onto the Hollywood screen. Louvish also looks anew at Chaplin’s and the Tramp’s social and political ideas—the challenge to fascism, defiance of the McCarthyite witch hunts, eventual “exile,” and last mature disguises as the serial killer Monsieur Verdoux and the dying English clown Calvero in Limelight. This book is an epic journey, summing up the roots of comedy and its appeal to audiences everywhere, who reveled in the clown’s raw energy, his ceaseless struggle against adversity, and his capacity to represent our own fears, foibles, dreams, inner demons and hopes.

A tale of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in 1905, a novel of history, ideas and delusionsFanning out from the small Moldavian village of Celovest at the turn of the 20th century, The Dream of Ages follows the global saga of the four sons and two daughters of a traditional Jewish family as their lives twist and turn in the storms of war, politics, art and ideology that rip apart the old Empires of the 19th century and create the schisms, aspirations, conflicts and realities of the modern world. Through WW I, the Russian Revolution and civil war, the dream of Zion, the magnet of America, the lure of the far east in China, the epic narratives of the scattered siblings turn from 1905 Odessa, the golden ages of Paris and Berlin, to the foundation years of Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood, the mad frenetic world of vintage vaudeville, the Jewish settlements in Palestine, resistance and terror, the tale is drawn together by the reluctant quest of the next generation for answers to the moral, social, political and psychological puzzles that bedevil our own Age of Confusion, our worship of the “new” undermined by the unavoidable consequences of what passed before.Told in the intertwined voices of the protagonists, a novel of history, ideas, delusions, myths, magic, the trials and errors of life, and the forces that made us what we are.