John Wayne: The Life and Legend

The New York Times bestselling biography of John Wayne: "authoritative and enormously engaging...Eyman takes you through Wayne's life, his death, and his legend in a detailed, remarkably knowledgeable yet extremely readable way" (Peter Bogdanovich, The New York Times Book Review).John Wayne died more than thirty years ago, but he remains one of today's five favorite movie stars. The celebrated Hollywood icon comes fully to life in this complex portrait by noted film historian and master biographer Scott Eyman. Exploring Wayne's early life with a difficult mother and a feckless father, "Eyman gets at the details that the bean-counters and myth-spinners miss...Wayne's intimates have told things here that they've never told anyone else" (Los Angeles Times). Eyman makes startling connections to Wayne's later days as an anti-Communist conservative, his stormy marriages to Latina women, and his notorious--and surprisingly long-lived--passionate affair with Marlene Dietrich. He also draws on the actor's own business records and, of course, his storied film career. "We all think we know John Wayne, in part because he seemed to be playing himself in movie after movie. Yet as Eyman carefully lays out, 'John Wayne' was an invention, a persona created layer by layer by an ambitious young actor" (The Washington Post). This is the most nuanced and sympathetic portrait available of the man who became a symbol of his country at mid-century, a cultural icon and quintessential American male against whom other screen heroes are still compared.

Author: Scott Eyman
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 04/21/2015
Pages: 672
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.50lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 1.60d
ISBN: 9781439199596

About the Author
Eyman, Scott: - Scott Eyman was formerly the literary critic at The Palm Beach Post and is the author or coauthor of fifteen books, including the bestseller John Wayne and (with actor Robert Wagner) the bestsellers Pieces of My Heart and You Must Remember This. Among his other books are Hank and Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart; Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille; Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer; and Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford. Eyman also writes book reviews for The Wall Street Journal, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. He and his wife, Lynn, live in West Palm Beach.