Terribly Intimate Portraits

Terribly Intimate Portraits is a glittering, mock-heroic gallery of biographies, memoirs, and diary fragments that skewers celebrity, politics, court society, and historical legend with extravagant wit. From the foreword's insistence on absolute truth to the narrator's delight in romance, public heroism, and theatrical self-importance, the book presents each life as both grand spectacle and comic invention. In "My American Diary," a flamboyant English visitor hurtles through New York, Broadway, Coney Island, Chinatown, the subway, and glittering social gatherings, alternately baffled, bruised, and enchanted by America's energy and eccentricity. The portraits range from the courtly rise and revolutionary downfall of Julie de Poopinac to the forest-born Madcap Moll, whose wild charm carries her from the New Forest to the absurd splendor of royalty. Along the way appear the saintly political muddle of E. Maxwell Snurge, the panic-driven folly of Jabez Puffwater, the theatrical genius of Gretchen Lieberwurst zu Schweinen-Kalber, and the sensational literary fame of Jake D'Annunzio Spout. Together, these comic lives celebrate and ridicule ambition, vanity, art, power, and the legends people make of themselves. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.