Tom Dardis (1926–2001)
Author of Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down
About the Author
Works by Tom Dardis
Some Time in the Sun: The Hollywood Years of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley and… (1976) 64 copies
Beyond — Editor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Dardis, Thomas Anthony
- Birthdate
- 1926
- Date of death
- 2001-11-02
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Brooklyn, New York, USA
- Place of death
- New York, New York, USA
- Education
- New York University (BA|English)
Columbia University (MA|English)
Columbia University (PhD|English) - Occupations
- editor in chief, Berkley Books
professor
Members
Reviews
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 7
- Members
- 356
- Popularity
- #67,310
- Rating
- 3.6
- Reviews
- 4
- ISBNs
- 19
Rating: 3.25* of five
The Book Description: Horace Liveright was a man of puzzling contradictions - a self-professed socialist and a high-living Wall Street gambler, a deeply caring father and a compulsive philanderer. It was Liveright who first thought of books as front-page news and invented the art of ballyhoo to publicize them. A risk-taker in publishing as well as on Wall Street, Liveright had much to do with the creation of the modern American literary canon. Besides Pound's work, Liveright's firm, Boni and Liveright, brought out T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, all of Eugene O'Neill's plays, Hemingway's In Our Time, Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay, and Hart Crane's The Bridge. Daring the fury of the antivice societies, Liveright published Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell. He relished bringing out books that were deemed obscene or affronts to common decency. Out of all this came seven Nobel Prize-winning authors. Liveright was also the cofounder of the Modern Library.
My Review: A very very interesting man, Liveright, and one whose efforts to make books into Events were so successful that he ended up sowing the seeds of the current crisis in traditional publishing. Oh well, there once lived a man who invented both Freon gas and tetraethyl lead additive for gasoline...unintended consequences abound in this life.
Liveright had one of those lives: Son of Jewish immigrants, he clawed his way to the top of the Wall Street bond market, married the daughter of a superrich industrialist, went all cultural by founding a publishing company and producing Broadway plays, and ended up broke, divorced, and alone before dying at forty-nine.
Dardis tries his best to ride herd on this gigantic life, but from beyond the grave Liveright refuses to be tidied up and made to make sense. I liked the fact that Dardis allowed the organic connections of materials to take precedence over strict chronology; but that’s also the weakest point of the book. It’s hard to retain all the details of the mess Liveright made of the different parts of his life as they come up at so many odd moments.
But all in all, I found this an exhilarating look at a man unjustly underknown today. What a ride he rode! And died before it all got old, and he did. Massive fun.… (more)