Camera Girl
The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023
“One of the most detailed, nuanced portraits of Jackie to date.” —The Washington Post
An illuminating and “wholly refreshing” (David Maraniss, New York Times bestselling author) biography of the young Jackie Bouvier Kennedy that covers her formative adventures abroad in Paris; her life as a writer and photographer in Washington, DC; and her romance with a dashing, charismatic Massachusetts congressman who shared her intellectual passion.
Camera Girl “shines with wit and intelligence” (Library Journal, starred review) as it brings to life Jackie’s years as a young, single woman trying to figure out who she wanted to become. Chafing at the expectations of her family and the societal limitations placed on women in that era, Jackie pursued her dream career as a writer. Set primarily during the years of 1949 to 1953, when Jackie was in her early twenties, the book recounts in heretofore unrevealed detail the story of her late college years and her early adulthood as a working woman.
Before she met John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier was the Washington Times-Herald’s “Inquiring Camera Girl,” posing compelling questions to members of the public on the streets of DC and snapping their photos with her unwieldy Graflex camera. She then fashioned the results into a daily column, of which six hundred were published.
Carl Sferrazza Anthony, a historian and leading expert on First Ladies, draws on these columns and previously unseen archives of Jackie’s writings from this time, along with insights gleaned from interviews he conducted with her friends, colleagues, and family members. Camera Girl offers a fresh perspective on the woman later known as Jacqueline Kennedy and Jackie O, introducing us to the headstrong, self-assured young woman who went on to be one of the world’s most famous people. “For anyone of any age, the Jackie in Camera Girl offers an example of intentional living” (Hillary Rodham Clinton).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even before Jackie Bouvier married John F. Kennedy, she was a force to be reckoned with, according to this deeply researched biography. Spotlighting the formative period from 1949, when Jackie spent her junior year of college studying in France, to 1953, when she married JFK, historian Anthony (Why They Wore It) reveals a young woman of fierce intelligence, ambition, and persistence. After returning from France, she transferred from Vassar College to George Washington University, where she won a contest to become a junior editor in Vogue magazine's Paris office (she eventually turned the prize down). Early in her courtship with JFK (they were first introduced by mutual friends at a dinner party in 1951 but only started seriously dating after he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1952), he asked her to translate passages from a dozen "obscure, plodding" French books and compile the material into a report on the history of France's involvement in Indochina. "That Jack Kennedy asked her to do this, and the chance it offered her to demonstrate the power of her mind, was irresistible," Anthony writes. He also sheds intriguing light on Jackie's stint as a columnist for the Washington Times-Herald, the engagement she called off prior to marrying JFK, and her volatile and occasionally violent relationship with her mother. The result is a convincing and colorful reconsideration of a first lady known more for her style than her substance.
