Edie: American Girl

by Jean Stein, George Plimpton (Editor)

Overview

When Edie was first published, it quickly became an international bestseller and then took its place among the classic books about the 1960s. Edie Sedgwick exploded into the public eye like a comet. She seemed to have it all: she was aristocratic and glamorous, vivacious and young, Andy Warhol’s superstar. But within a few years she flared out as quickly as she had appeared, and before she turned twenty-nine she was dead from a drug overdose.

In a dazzling tapestry of voices—family, friends, lovers, rivals—the entire meteoric trajectory of Edie Sedgwick’s life is brilliantly captured. And so is the Pop Art world of the ‘60s: the sex, drugs, fashion, music—the mad rush for pleasure and fame. All glitter and flash on the outside, it was hollow and desperate within—like Edie herself, and like her mentor, Andy Warhol. Alternately mesmerizing, tragic, and horrifying, this book shattered many myths about the ‘60s experience in America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802134103
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	10/14/1994
Edition description:	1st pbk. ed
Pages:	564
Sales rank:	347,250
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This is the book of the Sixties that we have been waiting for.”—Norman Mailer

“Through a kaleidoscope of seemingly fragmented voices, patterns form, giving brilliant definition to the very American tragedy of Edie Sedgwick, a woman…not likely to be forgotten after this haunting portrait.”—Publishers Weekly

“Extraordinary . . . a fascinating narrative that is both meticulously reported and expertly orchestrated.”—The New York Times

“An exceptionally seductive biography. . . . You can’t put it down. . . . It has novelistic excitement.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“What makes this book so unusual, unique almost, is the picture it paints of the New York counterculture. No one has ever done it better.”—The Atlanta Journal & Constitution

“There is no more classic summertime read.” —New York Magazine

Editorial Reviews

“This is the book of the Sixties that we have been waiting for.”—Norman Mailer

“Extraordinary . . . a fascinating narrative that is both meticulously reported and expertly orchestrated.”—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“The ultimate oral history and still the most objectively cool book I’ve ever read. It’s perfectly structured and the most important book about America in the 1960s.”—Sloane Crosley, T: The New York Times Style Magazine

“An exceptionally seductive biography. . . . You can’t put it down. . . . It has novelistic excitement.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Jean Stein’s 1982 book Edie: American Girl, edited with George Plimpton . . . gave oral history the particular shimmer that comes when lofty literary aims happen to coincide with sheer entertainment value . . . Edie gave an almost mythic quality to its subject’s persona and her brief rise and fall, yet in its telling you could also follow clear lines connecting disparate pieces of 20th-century American life: the hollow cult of celebrity; the fragile prospect of greater opportunity for women; the intoxicating dream of the West for certain Easterners; the peculiar pathologies of the very rich.”—Maria Russo, New York Times Book Review

“Through a kaleidoscope of seemingly fragmented voices, patterns form, giving brilliant definition to the very American tragedy of Edie Sedgwick, a woman . . . not likely to be forgotten after this haunting portrait.”—Publishers Weekly

“What makes this book so unusual, unique almost, is the picture it paints of the New York counterculture. No one has ever done it better.”—Atlanta Journal & Constitution

“Is anyone capable of picking up . . . Edie and putting it down before the very last page?”—Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review

“There is no more classic summertime read.”—New York Magazine

From the Publisher