Overview

Using the life and career of her father, an early Hollywood actor, New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot tells the thrilling story of the rise of popular culture through a transfixing personal lens. The arc of Lyle Talbot's career is in fact the story of American entertainment. Born in 1902, Lyle left his home in small-town Nebraska in 1918 to join a traveling carnival. From there he became a magician's assistant, an actor in a traveling theater troupe, a romantic lead in early talkies, then an actor in major Warner Bros. pictures with stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Carole Lombard, then an actor in cult B movies, and finally a part of the advent of television, with regular roles on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. Ultimately, his career spanned the entire trajectory of the industry.In her captivating, impeccably researched narrative--a charmed combination of Hollywood history, social history, and family memoir--Margaret Talbot conjures warmth and nostalgia for those earlier eras of '10s and '20s small-town America, '30s and '40s Hollywood. She transports us to an alluring time, simpler but also exciting, and illustrates the changing face of her father's America, all while telling the story of mass entertainment across the first half of the twentieth century.

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9781594487064

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New Yorker staff writer Talbot debuts with an affectionate biography of her father, stage, screen and TV actor Lyle Talbot. Mingling memoir and relevant social and cultural history, the author shows how her father's career in many ways paralleled the changes in the 20th-century entertainment industry. . . . A thorough, lovingly researched paean to a father and a way of life. -- Kirkus <br> What a wonderful, loving, beautifully researched and touching story this is! Lyle Talbot lived a charmed life--a player's life--from the final days of vaudeville to the golden years of American television. Somehow through it all (the glamour, the hardship, the stardom, the rejection and the many transformations of modernity) he comported himself with a dignity that feels very much out of time to a contemporary reader. His daughter's tender yet clear-headed remembrance of him is a gift and a treasure--and a top-notch documentation of Hollywood history, besides. --Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love <br> The real life of consummate entertainer Lyle Talbot turns out to be his most unforgettable role. He seems to have been part of every stage of the rise of the modern entertainment industry, yet perhaps his greatest fortune was to have his story so beautifully rendered by his daughter. Weaving together cultural history, biography, and delightful backstage accounts, Margaret Talbot has created a classic of narrative nonfiction--one that would have enthralled even the great man himself. --David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z<br> <br> Some people are born storytellers. Some people are born with a story to tell. Margaret Talbot is both. The Entertainer is a gorgeously detailed and relentlessly inventive portrait of her father's adventures in 1930s Hollywood and on the home front. --Karen Abbot, author of Sin in the Second City <br> Had Margaret Talbot devoted her beguiling prose simply to retelling her father's golden stories of Broadway and Hollywood, Then

What a wonderful, loving, beautifully researched and touching story this is! Lyle Talbot lived a charmed life--a player's life--from the final days of vaudeville to the golden years of American television. Somehow through it all (the glamour, the hardship, the stardom, the rejection and the many transformations of modernity) he comported himself with a dignity that feels very much out of time to a contemporary reader. His daughter's tender yet clear-headed remembrance of him is a gift and a treasure--and a top-notch documentation of Hollywood history, besides. --Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love <br> The real life of consummate entertainer Lyle Talbot turns out to be his most unforgettable role. He seems to have been part of every stage of the rise of the modern entertainment industry, yet perhaps his greatest fortune was to have his story so beautifully rendered by his daughter. Weaving together cultural history, biography, and delightful backstage accounts, Margaret Talbot has created a classic of narrative nonfiction--one that would have enthralled even the great man himself. --David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z

The real life of consummate entertainer Lyle Talbot turns out to be his most unforgettable role. He seems to have been part of every stage of the rise of the modern entertainment industry, yet perhaps his greatest fortune was to have his story so beautifully rendered by his daughter. Weaving together cultural history, biography, and delightful backstage accounts, Margaret Talbot has created a classic of narrative nonfiction--one that would have enthralled even the great man himself. --David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z

Author Information

Margaret Talbot has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2003. Previously, she was a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and an editor at The New Republic. She lives in Washington, D.C.

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