The Celebrity

A famous novelist arrives in a lake resort under an assumed name, is mistaken for an embezzler on the run, and finds it much harder to prove he is himself than he expected. Churchill — the American, so often confused with the British statesman that the two agreed the Englishman would sign himself Winston S. Churchill — wrote this in 1898 as a satire on literary celebrity, and it is his lightest and funniest. Sixty plates of portraiture and society scenes by painters including William Merritt Chase and Edvard Munch, spanning 1795 to 1924, echo the novel's own comedy of identity and mistaken fame.