Dana Stevens has been Slate’s film critic since 2006. She is also a cohost of the magazine’s long-running culture podcast, Slate Culture Gabfest, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Bookforum. She lives with her family in New York City. Camera Man is her first book.
"Was Buster Keaton the most influential filmmaker of the first half
of the twentieth century? Dana Stevens makes a compelling case in
this dazzling mix of biography, essays, and cultural
history." —Esquire
"Stevens offers a series of pas de deux between Keaton and other
personages of his time ... It's a new kind of history, making more
of overlapping horizontal 'frames' than of direct
chronological history, and Stevens does it extraordinarily
well." —The New Yorker
“This biography of Buster Keaton by Slate's longtime film critic
has been the Film Twitter event of this winter, and for good
reason.” —Vanity Fair
“In this innovative, exciting combo of biography, history, essay,
and acute cultural analysis, Dana Stevens does something I would
have thought impossible—she tells the story of Buster Keaton’s life
as if it were a Buster Keaton movie. This book is an exhilarating
new way to view the man, his life, his art, and his
genius.” —MARK HARRIS, author of Mike Nichols: A
Life, Five Came Back and Pictures at a
Revolution
"This book is as dazzling as a silent movie flickering before you
in a dark room. Stevens has managed the rare feat -- conjuring a
life in all its specific detail while placing it in a modern
context so that it becomes newly vital. Buster Keaton leaps off the
page.” —RACHEL SYME, staff writer, The New Yorker
“In her brightly written and incredibly well-researched book, Dana
Stevens celebrates the enduring filmic presence of Buster
Keaton—"The Great Stone Face"—even while transforming him
into a guidepost and compass from which to survey the
spectacular rise of American popular culture in the modern
era. Camera Man offers a unique kaleidoscope of
cultural history, film criticism, and fascinating stories and
anecdotes, filtered through Stevens’ distinctly modern sensibility
and held together, in the end, by the slight but mesmerizing figure
of Keaton himself.” —JAMES SANDERS, author of Celluloid
Skyline: New York and the Movies and co-writer of the
award-winning PBS series New York: A Documentary Film
"The world has been waiting for a Buster Keaton chronicler like
Dana Stevens, who unfolds the great man’s archetypal American life
with uncommon wit and grace. But Camera Man offers so
much more than biography, revealing its subject as the embodiment,
and the instigator, of a turbulent century’s transformations.
Vaudeville and Hollywood, disruptive technologies and shifting
mores, the complications of race and class and gender, the
collisions of art and commerce—Stevens packs it all into an
electric, genre-busting book that tosses up new ideas,
arguments, and aperçus on every page. It’s a literary highwire act
in the spirit of Buster’s famous cinematic set-pieces: a stunt with
soul.” —JODY ROSEN, author of Two Wheels Good: The
History and Mystery of the Bicycle
"Buster didn't talk, but luckily Dana Stevens is here to tell us
how the Great Stone Face invented a new film language. This
rollicking read vivifies the era of innovation and upheaval that
shaped the artist who shaped cinema for the next century and
counting.” —AMY NICHOLSON, author of Tom Cruise: Anatomy
of an Actor and the forthcoming Extra Girls
"I have written three books on Buster Keaton’s work, and have
barely scratched the surface of his deep and amazing talent.
Stevens' book fills in a lot of gaps with a fan’s passion and a
scholar’s insight. It is a fine contribution to the
continuing scholarship on one of cinema’s most brilliant comedians
and filmmakers. “ —JAMES L. NEIBAUR, author of Buster
Keaton's Silent Shorts: 1920-1923, Arbuckle and
Keaton, and The Fall of Buster Keaton
"An inspired merger of biography, film criticism and social
history, this smartly-written, impressively researched book, with
its worldly, intelligent grasp of the aesthetic and business sides
of movies, deserves a place in every movie-lover's
library." —PHILLIP LOPATE, film critic and author of The Art
of the Personal Essay: an Anthology from the Classical Era to the
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