About the Author

Emily Worth Leider, a former editor and reviewer for many publications, including the San Francisco Review of Books, is the author of California's Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times. She lives in northern California.

Reviews

Leider (California's Daughter: Gertrude Atherton & Her Times, LJ 11/15/90) traces West's development from child performer to coltish shimmy dancer to the drawling, wise-cracking persona recognized today. The author's focus on West's early career allows her to examine significant changes in American culture as the population became predominantly urban and the new media of film and radio began encroaching on established forms of entertainment. Yet the heart of the story is West, already a veteran performer with over 30 years' experience when she arrived in Hollywood. But once West honed her persona, she was reluctant to deviate from the successful formula, stifling her arresting creativity and originality. This combined with perennial censorship problems caused the decades-long break in her film career. Recommended for large public libraries and subject collections.‘Marianne Cawley, Enoch Pratt Free Lib., Baltimore, Md.

Exhaustive research, fine writing and a keen appreciation of Mae West's own bawdy wit inform this energetic and erudite biography of the flamboyant vaudeville, theater and film star. Brooklyn-born West (1893-1980) made her own way in show business at a very early age, taking charge of her career, taking whomever she wanted into her bed (she never spent the night in someone else's if she could avoid it) and, through sheer willpower, working her way up to become a film star and sex symbol in her 40s. Her career, which all but ended after various scandals and the release of My Little Chickadee in 1940, is chronicled with an acute eye for detail. Leider (California's Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times) has written a first-rate biography as well as a social and cultural history that vividly evokes the alternatively lubricious and censorious world of the popular New York stage. But West is always at the center of the narrative, making her own decisions, writing her own plays and novels, insisting at every point on having what is now called "creative control." The author's portrait is an affectionate one, though no whitewash: West often hired gay men, but disapproved of lesbians; she went to jail briefly for public indecency, after the authorities shut down her play Sex; and she often took credit for the work of others. But Leider makes a convincing case for West as a feminist forerunner of such sexually and professionally independent performers as Roseanne and Madonna, etching her persona indelibly across the American consciousness. Photos. (June)