Century Girl LTD (Hardcover)
Description
The Ziegfeld Follies, Florenz Ziegfeld's stage spectacular, promised the best performers, the most lavish sets, and the most ravishing girls. At fourteen, Doris Eaton Travis became one of these prized beauties.
Over the past century, Doris has performed for presidents and princesses, entertained Gershwin, Lindbergh, and Astaire, starred in silent and talking pictures, bantered with Babe Ruth, offended Henry Ford, outlived six siblings, written a newspaper column, hosted a television show, earned a Phi Beta Kappa degree in history, raised turkeys, and raced horses. Doris has lived through it all with utmost grace and strength of character—and never missed a step.
While Today, The Tonight Show, CNN, Rosie O'Donnell, 20/20 and the New York Times have all showcased Doris, journalist and artist Lauren Redniss tells Doris's singular story in an utterly original way. Weaving archival imagery with compelling prose, Redniss has created a narrative landscape that is as surreal and delightful as it is rich with meaning.
Immensely fun, seductive, inspiring, and wise (much like its star attraction, Doris Eaton Travis), Century Girl is an innovation in storytelling. It can be read as a graphic narrative or a historical tapestry, or simply relished for its stunning visual effect.
About the Author
Lauren Redniss is the author of Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies. A graduate of Brown University and the School of Visual Arts, she is a frequent contributor to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, which nominated her work for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2008-2009 she was a Fellow at the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, where she completed work on Radioactive. Lauren Redniss is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and teaches at the Parsons School of Design. She lives in New York City.
Praise for Century Girl LTD…
“My favorite new book this year. . . a visually dazzling melange. . . unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.”
-Slate (best books of 2006 pick)
“Not only did Doris Eaton Travis break records for accomplishment and humanity, she also had great hair and shoes.”
-Isaac Mizrahi
“The opposite of a page-turner: it’s a page-stopper, a page-savorer, in short: an unmitigated delight.”
-Lawrence Weschler, author of Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder and Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences
“I wish Lauren Redniss would write and illustrate my biography in the dreamy, luminous way she did Doris Eaton Travis’s.”
-Maira Kalman, author and illustrator
“Doris Eaton is the darling of Broadway, a New York treasure.”
-Nils Hanson, National Ziegfeld Club
“With Century Girl, Lauren Redniss creates an entirely new genre of biography.”
-Nylon magazine
“Lauren Redniss takes a graphically provocative approach in telling [Doris Eaton Travis’s] story.”
-Daily News
“Striking and unique. . . captivating readers by twining simple, evocative text with a stunning array of images.”
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)