"An unforgettable portrait of an exuberant yet troubled artist who so enriched the American songbook""Blue Moon, " "Where or When, " "The Lady Is a Tramp," "My Funny Valentine," "Isn't It Romantic?," "My Romance," "There's a Small Hotel," "Falling in Love with Love," "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"--lyricist Lorenz Hart, together with composer Richard Rodgers, wrote some of the most memorable songs ever created. More than half a century after their collaboration ended, Rodgers & Hart songs are indispensable to the repertoire of nightclub singers everywhere. "A Ship Without a Sail "is the story of the complicated man who was Lorenz Hart.
His lyrics spin with brilliance and sophistication, yet at their core is an unmistakable wistfulness. The sweetness of "My Romance" and "Isn't It Romantic?" is unsurpassed in American song, but Hart's lyrics could also be cynical, funny, ironic. He brought a unique wit and elegance to popular music.
Larry Hart and Richard Rodgers wrote approximately thirty Broadway musicals and dozens of songs for Hollywood films. At least four of their musicals--"On Your Toes, Babes in Arms, The Boys from Syracuse, "and "Pal Joey"-- have become classics. But despite their prodigious collaboration, Rodgers and Hart were an odd couple. Rodgers was precise, punctual, heterosexual, handsome, and eager to be accepted by Society. Hart was barely five feet tall, alcoholic, homosexual, and more comfortable in a bar or restaurant than anywhere else. Terrified of solitude, he invariably threw the party and picked up the check. His lyrics are all the more remarkable considering that he never sustained a romantic relationship, living his entire life with his mother, who died only months before he died at age forty-eight.
Gary Marmorstein's revelatory biography includes many of the lyrics that define Hart's legacy--those clever, touching stanzas that still move us or make us laugh.
Review :
"Sophisticated, engaging, elegant, and packed with absorbing detail, "A Ship Without A Sail" is the definitive biography of Larry Hart for which all of us who love his work have been waiting. That Gary Marmorstein has captured the soaring highs and the crushing lows of that short, unhappy life so completely and so sympathetically is a truly remarkable--even enviable--achievement. And I speak of what I know." --Frederick Nolan, author of "The Sound of Their Music: The Story of Rodgers & Hammerstein" and" Lorenz Hart: A Poet on Broadway"
"A deeply sympathetic biography of Lorenz Hart, the talented, troubled lyricist of film and Broadway fame. Marmorstein has done an enormous service for fans of stage and movie musicals of the early decades of the 20th century. . . . 'Ev'rything I've got belongs to you, ' goes one Hart lyric that now, thanks to the author's thorough, affectionate research, holds another, profoundly poignant meaning." --"Kirkus Reviews "(starred review)
"The lyricist who, with composer Richard Rodgers, penned 'Blue Moon, ' 'The Lady Is a Tramp, ' and other standards is a figure worthy of his own bittersweet songs in this graceful biography. . . . A vivid panorama of pre-WWII musical theater and the efflorescence of Jewish-American tune- and word-smithing that created it. Marmorstein's take on his subject's life feels like a Rodgers and Hart show, nicely balanced between exhilarating spectacle and pithy revelations of character." --"Publishers Weekly "(starred review)
"Brings a new dimension to so many familiar songs." --"Booklist
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"A fine new biography of Lorenz Hart by Gary Marmorstein, "A Ship Without a Sail", makes clear that Hart, over the years since his early death at age 48 in 1943, has been taken up the very society he set out, in his lyrics, to unsettle." --David Hadju, "The New Republic
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"The whole story, joyful and unflinching, of an astounding talent. This biography really has Hart." --Laurence Bergreen, author of "As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin" and "Columbus: The Four Voyages
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"Hart has his shining hour in a new biography. . . . It's the absorbing story of a sparkling but tormented artist and a rich slice of show business history. . . . "A Ship Without a Sail" quotes liberally from Hart's lyrics, and Marmorstein's analysis is always interesting and often revelatory." --John Fleming, "Tampa Bay Tribune
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"Marmorstein bolsters the story of Hart's rocketlike career with a wealth of factual detail. . . . [Marmorstein's] biographer's sense, his dogged researches, and his fair-mindedness constantly lead him in good directions. His account of Rodgers's controversial involvement in Hart's business affairs at his death is the best-balanced I've encountered." --Michael Feingold, the "Village Voice
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"Marmorstein brings to the task just the right precision instruments for dissecting Larry Hart -- panache, sympathy and smarts. The very title of his book goes to the heart of the tortured story he tells so well. . . . He knows the period and its players inside out and along the way offers wonderful cameos of many minor figures in the story..." --J. D. McClatchy, "The Wall Street Journal
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