Now, after years of intensive research, McGilligan sorts out fact from fiction and reveals untold, fully documented anecdotes of Welles' first exploits and triumphs, from starring as a teenager on the Gate Theatre stage in Dublin and bullfighting in Seville to his time in the New York theater and his fraught partnership with John Houseman in the Mercury Theatre, and to his arrival in Hollywood and the making of Citizen Kane. The tales of his youthful achievements were so colorful and improbable that Welles, with his air of mischief, was often thought to have made them up. He chronicles Welles' early life growing up in Wisconsin and Illinois, as the son of an alcoholic industrialist and a radical suffragist and classical musician, and the magical early years of his career, including his marriages and affairs, his influential friendships, and his artistic collaborations. In this magisterial biography, Patrick McGilligan brings young Orson into focus as never before. No American artist or entertainer has enjoyed a more dramatic rise than Orson Welles. For the centennial of his birth, the defining wunderkind of modern entertainment gets his due in a groundbreaking new biography of his early years - from his first forays in theater and radio to the inspiration and making of Citizen Kane.
0 Comments
For Poe, alchemy became a metaphor for the transforming power of imagination for Hawthorne, it became a means of representing the redeeming power of love for Fuller, it figured the reconciliation of gender opposites. These later writers used alchemical imagery to describe both the regeneration of the individual and the possible transformation of society. While Taylor used alchemical metaphors to illustrate the redeeming grace of God upon the soul, these same metaphors were used by Poe, Hawthorne, and Fuller to depict a broader concept of redemption. This book examines the literary representation of alchemical theory and the metaphor of alchemical regeneration in the works of Edward Taylor, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller. Though its significance declined with the rise of chemistry, alchemy continued to captivate the imagination of writers and its images still appear in modern creative works. From the Middle Ages to the close of the 17th century, alchemy was fundamental to Western culture, as scores of experimenters sought to change lead into gold. From me you will hear the whole truth, though not, by Zeus, gentlemen, expressed in embroidered and stylized phrases like theirs, but things spoken at random and expressed in the first words that come to mind, for I put my trust in the justice of what I say, and let none of you expect anything else. If they mean that, I would agree that I am an orator, but not after their manner, for indeed, as I say, practically nothing they said was true. That they were not ashamed to be immediately proved wrong by the facts, when I show myself not to be an accomplished speaker at all, that I thought was most shameless on their part-unless indeed they call an accomplished speaker the man who speaks the truth. Of the many lies they told, one in particular surprised me, namely that you should be careful not to be deceived by an accomplished speaker like me. And yet, hardly anything of what they said is true. I do not know, men of Athens, how my accusers affected you as for me, I was almost carried away in spite of myself, so persuasively did they speak. |