In conversation with David Nasaw

In this groundbreaking portrait of a courageous icon of independence, Hilary A.Hallett traces Elinor Glyn’s meteoric rise from a depressed society darling to a world-renowned celebrity author who consorted with world leaders from St.Petersburg to Cairo to New York. After reporting from the trenches during World War I, Glyn was lured by American movie producers from Paris to Los Angeles for her remarkable third act. Weaving together years of deep archival research, Hallett movingly  conveys how Glyn, more than any other individual during the Roaring Twenties, crafted early Hollywood’s glamorous romantic aesthetic. She taught the screen’s  greatest leading men to make love in ways that set audiences aflame, and coined the term “It Girl,” which turned actress Clara Bow into the symbol of the first sexual revolution.

Hilary A. Hallett is the Mendelson Family Professor and director of American studies and associate professor of history at Columbia University. The author of Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood, she has written for the Los Angeles Times.

David Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History Emeritus at the CUNY Graduate Center and a past president of the Society of American Historians. His most recent book is The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War. He is also the author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, a New York Times “Ten Best Books of the Year” and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography. His bestseller Andrew Carnegie was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and the winner of the New-York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst was honored with several awards, include the Bancroft Prize for History.