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by: James Reidel
List Price: $19.95Amazon.com's Price: $15.56 You Save: $4.39 (22%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9780803259775
ISBN: 0803259778
Label: Bison Books
Manufacturer: Bison Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 420
Publication Date: March 01, 2007
Publisher: Bison Books
Sales Rank: 422164
Studio: Bison Books
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Critic, novelist, filmmaker, jazz musician, painter, and, above all, poet, Weldon Kees performed, practiced, and published with the best of his generation of artists—the so-called middle generation, which included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman. His dramatic disappearance (a probable suicide) at the age of forty-one, his movie-star good looks, his role in various movements of the day, and his shifting relationships with key figures in the arts have made him one of the more intriguing—and elusive—artists of the time. In this long-awaited biography, James Reidel presents the first full account of Kees’s troubled yet remarkably accomplished life. Reidel traces Kees’s career from his birth in 1914 and boyhood in Beatrice, Nebraska, to his stint as an award-winning short-story writer and novelist, his rise as a poet and critic in New York, his branching off into abstract expressionism, jazz music, and theater, and his experimental and scientific filmmaking and photography. Going beyond the cult status that has grown up around Kees over the years, this work fairly and judiciously places him as a cultural adventurer at a particularly rich and significant moment in postwar twentieth-century America.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Kee's other "Vanished Art"
While I can't comment on this book or his poetry with any authority, I would like to point out another facet to Kees' creativity to those who are interested - he was also an amazingly accomplished painter. The artworks illustrated in recent book, "The Writer's Brush," were my first introduction to him, and they every bit as compelling and interesting as anything else being produced at that time, if not moreso.
Rating:  - Que Viva James Reidel
Last night at the Cinematheque here in San Francisco, we watched a slew of Weldon Kees films. Guest curator Jenni Olson last year turned an elegaic tribute to a dead friend, Mark Finch, into a feature documentary called THE JOY OF LIFE, which spoke in a spare and moving way about people drawn to the Golden Gate Bridge, like Finch, to take their own lives. She told us that in the course of her research she came across the life, work and of course the disappearance of Weldon Kees, whose car was found ... Read More
Rating: - Neglected Genius
This is an entertaining and beautifully and lovingly written biography of a neglected but indelible American poet. Read the poems, and read this book, do yourself a favor.
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