Artists & Authors
A Life in Good Company
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Join a literary insider for a behind-the-scenes tour of art heists, opera icons, and the golden age of publishing.
From the author of Scribners: Five Generations in Publishing comes this new collection of personal essays reflecting on the past fifty years of his pursuits and passions in literature, art, and music. Beginning with a memoir of his father’s tutelage through letters to a young son away at school, it moves along to his “dual professions” on parallel tracks—book publishing and art history.
Behind-the-scenes stories of famous Scribner authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe give way to the section on Scribner’s forte, the art of the Baroque masters: a murderous Caravaggio and the two tycoons Rubens and Bernini.
From his role in a sting operation to recover a stolen Rubens painting on Miami Beach to his personal profiles of three luminous sopranos—Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Frederica von Stade, and Mary Costa—Scribner shares a fascinating peek into the life and loves of a Renaissance man.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scribner (Home by Another Route), an art scholar and descendant of the publishing family, serves up a hit-or-miss collection of essays on art, music, and literature. The pieces are divided into three sections: the first and most unified covers books and writers, focusing on great American authors published by Scribners & Sons—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, among others—and the men named "Charles Scribner" ("ours is a redundant family," he writes) who facilitated their publication. The second centers on painting and sculpture, and, for the most part, comprises impersonal, lightly academic meditations on the lives and work of such artists as Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, and Michelangelo. (One exception is an essay in which Scribner relates playing a small part in an undercover operation to bust art thieves.) The final and shortest section covers opera singers and refreshingly returns to the personal, with a long, standout piece about a "pilgrimage" the author took to visit soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf at her home in Austria. While Scribner's scholarship is lucid, many of the essays appeared previously as book introductions, lectures, or magazine articles and can end abruptly or otherwise feel incomplete devoid of their original context. This has its moments, but doesn't add up to more than the sum of its parts.
