Description
Book SynopsisHow and why, in a time of homophobia and closeted homosexuality, did two openly gay writers become mass-market celebrities?
Trade Review"Balancing biographical accounts with highly salient readings of a number of their works, So Famous and So Gay offers smart, surprising insights into the ways in which Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein achieved cultural prominence in spite of the homophobia that kept other openly gay writers of the period out of mainstream literary culture. A daring, suggestive, and intensely interesting book."—Lisa Ruddick, University of Chicago
"In So Famous and So Gay, Jeff Solomon amasses a treasure trove archive—literature, reviews, biographies, photographs, interviews—from which he examines the gayness, strangeness, and celebrity that combusted to create the queer precocity of Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein. At once critically expansive and insightful, this book is also a good story. Like Stein and Capote, Solomon is an engaging stylist in his own right. Read to learn, read to enjoy (imagine that!)."—Ken Corbett, author of A Murder Over a Girl
"Every bit as ‘fabulous’ as the subtitle promises, So Famous and So Gay focuses on two writers—Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein—whose strategies for politicizing questions of sexual identity included the manufacture of public personae as queerly flamboyant ‘geniuses’ and the exploitation of their author photos. Brilliantly exposing of the commodification of authorial identity, Solomon also offers a welcome corrective to strands of queer theory that neglect the specificities of same-sex desire."—Joseph Allen Boone, University of Southern California
"Jeff Solomon’s So Famous and So Gay effectively reinvigorates the single author genre by stretching its scope and preconceived boundaries. Solomon’s magisterial command of twentieth century American literary culture and his provocative use of author photos make this particular two-author study an engaging work of scholarship."—James Penner, author of Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture
"This book is about gayness overlooked and gay lives lovingly, materially recovered."—The Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide
"A very ambitious and innovative work in the field of queer studies."—Leonardo
"Focusing on the nexus of sexuality, celebrity, and text, Solomon positions Capote and Stein as ‘comprehensive test cases’ for the interaction between homosexuality and US literature in the first half of the twentieth century." —American Literature
Table of ContentsContents
Prologue: Beneath the Mask
Introduction: Stein and Capote in Theory
Part I
1. Young, Effeminate, and Strange: The Debut of Truman Capote
2. Capote, Forster, and the Trillings: Homophobia and Literary Culture at Mid-Century
Part II
3. Gertrude Stein, Opium Queen: Notes on a Mistaken Embrace
4. Gertrude Stein in Life and TIME: A Respectable Commodity
5. Three Lesbian Lives: A Map of Same-Sex Passion
Coda: Janet Malcolm and Woody Allen Adrift in the Past
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
