Biography

Kay Thompson was Judy Garland’s confidante, Liza Minnelli’s godmother, Lena Horne’s matchmaker, and Eloise’s creator. As a singer and vocal coach, an actor and dancer, a nightclub fixture and noted clotheshorse, she was among the most well-connected entertainers in the mid-20th century. Yet today she is much less famous than any of her real or fictional friends. A new biography by Sam Irvin, a movie and TV director, hopes to correct what its author sees as an injustice, and bring well-deserved acclaim to a woman he describes as “wildly talented and hilariously eccentric.’’ Sadly, the book...

A new book captures the quirks and talent of one of New Orleans' most celebrated and eccentric entertainers, as well as his ups and downs and the era that shaped him. The title of the book, published by the Historic New Orleans Collection, is "Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans. " Later in life, K-Doe proclaimed himself the "Emperor of the World," and few fans would disagree with him. K-Doe emerged in the early 1960s rock and R&B scene, and until his death at age 65 in 2001 was one of the most unforgettable figures in New Orleans music.

Fanny: A Fiction By Edmund White Ecco, 384 pp., $24.95 At 63, American novelist Edmund White can look back on a lengthy career highlighted by stylized 1970s gay-themed novels like "Forgetting Elena" and "Nocturnes for the King of Naples. " In 1982, he added "A Boy's Own Story," an ultimately bitter gay coming-of-age story. Diagnosed HIV-positive in 1985, White announced the news and incorporated the theme of AIDs in much of his subsequent writing. He has fortunately remained in good health and highly productive, with his latest novel a first attempt at historical fiction.

Though he's far from done clowning, Barry Lubin, a.k.a. Grandma, will bid adieu to the Big Apple Circus when the tent comes down May 13. It's a fitting bookend to his circus career. In 1974, Lubin, on a lark, auditioned for Ringling's Clown College at the Boston Garden. BOOKS: What are you reading now? LUBIN: I just finished "Gun, with Occasional Music" by Jonathan Lethem. My daughter, who supplies me with a lot of my reading material, recommended it. It's surreal and very visual, which is the kind of book I like, less wordy and more descriptive.

LONDON -- Journalist Anthony Sampson, who wrote a best-selling analysis of 1960s British life and a biography of former South African President Nelson Mandela, has died at age 78, his friends said. Mr. Sampson died on Dec. 18, according to a tribute by his friend John Thompson published yesterday by The Guardian newspaper. No cause of death was given. An incisive interviewer, Mr. Sampson was the pioneering editor of South Africa's Drum magazine in the 1950s. He first met Mandela in a "shebeen," one of the illegal drinking clubs that existed at the time, and later...

NEW YORK -- Marshall Frady, a civil rights reporter and award-winning television journalist who wrote a controversial biography of George Wallace, died Tuesday. He was 64. Mr. Frady, who had been diagnosed with cancer, died at his home in Greenville, S.C., according to his wife, Barbara Gandolfo-Frady. A native of Augusta, Ga., Mr. Frady wrote for Newsweek, the Saturday Evening Post, and Life Magazine during the 1960s and 1970s, frequently interviewing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders.

Ralph Ellison: A Biography , By Arnold Rampersad, Knopf, 672 pp., $35 Whatever happened to Ralph Ellison's long-awaited second novel? This question persistently nipped at Ellison's heels long after his celebrated 1952 breakthrough "Invisible Man" quickly propelled him into the front ranks of 20th - century American writers -- and long after the forlorn accounts of the 1967 fire that consumed his country home and his later manuscript. For that matter, whatever happened to Ellison?

E. E. Cummings: A Biography By Christopher Sawyer-Lauanno Sourcebooks, 606 pp., illustrated, $29.95 At the time of his death E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings was second in popularity in America only to Robert Frost, and by then had been able to do what very few poets had ever done: earn a living from writing books and reading his work to an adoring public. The critics were divided, however; while Robert Graves and W. H. Auden considered him first-rate, R. P. Blackmur, Edmund Wilson, and Kenneth Burke were less effusive.

William Dean Howells: A Writer's Life By Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson University of California, 519 pp., illustrated, $34.95 The departure from Boston of The Atlantic Monthly magazine after 148 years coincides with the arrival of Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson's meticulous and highly readable biography of William Dean Howells. In the 1880s Howells was the dominant literary eminence of the era. He was revered by other writers, the author of almost 100 books of fiction, prose, and subjects of critical and cultural significance, countless polemics, poems, and 36 plays (one produced)

Walt Disney : The Triumph of the American Imagination By Neal Gabler Knopf, 851pp., illustrated, $35 Speak the name Walt Disney and someone is bound to reply, in all seriousness, "Isn't he the guy who had himself frozen?" It's an ironic outcome that a man who towered over the world's popular entertainment during his lifetime, with a growing cultural legacy down to the present, has to share his posthumous reputation with an urban legend apparently concocted by a supermarket tabloid.

You probably know it even if you've never been to Rockport: the little red fish shack, sitting on a pier in the harbor, that's been sketched and painted and photographed so many times that it's known as Motif No. 1. But most people don't know how it came to be such an icon of the Cape Ann village and its artist colony. Now author L.M. Vincent tells the whole tale in his "In Search of Motif No. 1," a new paperback from the History Press subtitled "The History of a Fish Shack. " "It didn't become famous because it was the most quaint and picturesque fish shack in the world.

A biography of former "American Idol" judge Simon Cowell is coming soon. Ballantine Books announced Thursday that it will publish Tom Bower's "Sweet Revenge: The Intimate Life of Simon Cowell" in the spring. According to Ballantine, an imprint of Random House Inc., Bower has had "hundreds of hours" of access to Cowell. The book will also include "direct contributions" from Cowell's friends and foes. The acerbic Brit was a judge on Fox's "American Idol" for nine seasons. He left "Idol" to launch his British-born hit series "The X Factor" in the U.S. It debuted on...

Concord resident Tim Riley (inset) was 10 years old when he saw "Let it Be" in a movie theater in Boulder, Colo., in 1970. He was already familiar with a few of the Beatles' hits, but was fascinated with the band's "humble gesture" of allowing fans to observe them rehearsing works in progress for their album of the same name. "It's a weird movie to have such a profound impact on a little kid," said Riley, "but it was my introduction to rock history through the Beatles. " Riley, a classically trained pianist, music critic for National Public Radio, and journalism professor at...

STEVE JOBS By Walter Isaacson Simon and Schuster, 656 pp., illustrated, $35 Life often reduced Steve Jobs to tears. But he rarely suffered alone. The cofounder of Apple Inc. spread his unhappiness like a virus, abusing his friends, neglecting his family, insulting and reviling his colleagues. And almost to a person, they loved Jobs to the end. It's a neat trick, inspiring such extremes of loyalty and dread. Jobs carried it off, while endearing himself to the millions who bought his company's products.

Sony Corp.'s movie studio is in final talks to acquire the movie rights to the highly anticipated authorized biography of Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. According to a person familiar with the matter, the studio is negotiating to pay about $1 million for the rights to the project. The person declined to be identified because the deal has not been finalized. Sony was also behind the Oscar-winning biopic "The Social Network," about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and "This Is It," a documentary made of concert rehearsal...

THE ROGUE: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin By Joe McGinniss Crown, 336 pp., $25 In his controversial new biography, Joe McGinniss shows us two faces of the divisive Sarah Palin: one the hyper-patriotic, chirpily upbeat "hockey mom" crusading against the evils of Big Government, and the other an insecure, intellectually challenged, and highly vindictive Machiavelli in Manolo Blahniks. The tale we get is not pretty, but then again the teller seems less than unbiased.

Borges: A Life By Edwin Williamson Viking, 574 pp., illustrated, $34.95 Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) persuaded his readers that he was a writer without a biography. He used to write that nothing more important than reading a line of Shakespeare happened to him. In the end, he wrote, the forms that a writer traces in his work compose his true face. Borges was displeased by psychological writing (Dostoyevsky proves that nobody is impossible, he joked) as much as by self-expression (any I could be another I)

William Wallace, a professor of art history at Washington University in St. Louis, is widely considered America’s preeminent authority on Michelangelo. In an array of scholarly books and articles written over the past 20 years, he has argued for a fundamental reassessment of the great Renaissance master’s personal and professional character. Through Wallace’s meticulously documented research and analysis, Michelangelo has emerged not as the isolated, brooding loner of legend, but as an entrepreneur of the arts, deftly negotiating complex networks of patronage and influence while directing a lively band of...

JAGGER: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue By Marc Spitz Gotham, 310 pp., illustrated, $26 Mick Jagger is perhaps rock's greatest frontman, but over the past few decades he's played second fiddle to Rolling Stones colleague Keith Richards. Whereas Richards has been largely viewed as the backbone of the band, Jagger is often portrayed as being uncommitted to the group and to rock 'n' roll in general. That's the type of popular opinion Marc Spitz attempts to challenge in his new biography-cum-critical analysis, "Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler,...

AN EMERGENCY IN SLOW MOTION: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus By William Todd Schultz Bloomsbury, 247 pp., $25 One could argue, convincingly, that the last word on the photographer Diane Arbus is Patricia Bosworth's prizewinning 1984 biography. Bosworth's fascinating, insightful account of the art, life, and psyche of Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971, is not without its shortcomings - some of them because of the Arbus estate's unwillingness to cooperate with the project - but Bosworth gave Arbus the biography she deserved.