American Rhapsody | Claudia Roth Pierpont, Jonathan Galassi | Art and Literature Series Event

FREE - Auditorium doors open at 5:30 p.m.

From the shattered gentility of Edith Wharton's heroines to racial confrontation in the songs of Nina Simone, American Rhapsody presents a kaleidoscopic story of the creation of a culture, and raises fascinating questions all along the way. Was Orson Welles the twentieth century’s greatest interpreter of Shakespeare? What inspired the Chrysler Building’s glorious crown? How did the failure of Porgy and Bess affect George Gershwin?

The arc of our racial history from Bert Williams's blackface performances to James Baldwin's prophetic thoughts about a black presidency are also part of this event with authors Claudia Roth Pierpont and Jonathan Galassi discussing American problems and American genius.

This new book American Rhapsody: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars and One Great Building  presents a series of deeply involving portraits of American artists and innovators who have helped to shape the country in the modern age.

Claudia Roth Pierpont expertly mixes biography and criticism, history and reportage, to bring these portraits to life and to link them in surprising ways. It isn't far from Wharton's brave new women to F. Scott Fitzgerald's giddy flappers, and on to the big-screen command of Katharine Hepburn and the dangerous dames of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled world.

The improvisatory jazziness of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue has its counterpart in the great jazz baby of the New York skyline, the Chrysler Building. Questions of an American acting style are traced from Orson Welles to Marlon Brando, while the new American painting emerges in the gallery of Peggy Guggenheim. And we trace the country's racial progress from Bert Williams's blackface performances to James Baldwin's warning of the fire next time, however slow and bitter and anguished this progress may be. American Rhapsody offers a history of twentieth-century American invention and genius. It is about the joy and profit of being a heterogeneous people, and the immense difficulty of this human experiment.

Copies of American Rhapsody: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars and One Great Building (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016) are available for purchase and signing at the end of event.

Claudia Roth Pierpont is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she has written about the arts for more than twenty years. She is the author of Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, an exploration of the life and work of Philip Roth, and Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in New York City.

Jonathan Galassi, a lifelong veteran of the publishing world, is the author of Muse, his debut novel, as well as three collections of poetry and translations of the Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. A former Guggenheim Fellow and poetry editor of The Paris Review, he also writes for The New York Review of Books and other publications. He lives in New York City.

Conceived and organized by Arezoo Moseni, and in its sixth year, Art and Literature Series events bring forth pollinations across the literary and visual arts with readings and discussions by acclaimed artists, authors and poets.

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