Sidney Lumet: A Life

  "Sidney Lumet: A Life" by Maura Spiegel, who teaches literature and film at Columbia University and Barnard College and is co-director of the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Humanities and Ethics at Vagelos Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, is the first-ever biography of the seminal American director whose remarkable life traces a line through American entertainment history
   
   Acclaimed as the ultimate New York movie director, Sidney Lumet began his astonishing five-decades-long directing career with the now classic 12 Angry Men, followed by such landmark films as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network. His remarkably varied output included award-winning adaptations of plays by Anton Chekhov, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill, whose Long Day’s Journey into Night featured Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson in their most devastating performances.
   
   Renowned as an “actor’s director,” Lumet attracted an unmatched roster of stars, among them: Henry Fonda, Sophia Loren, Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Ethan Hawke, and Philip-Seymour Hoffman, accruing eighteen Oscar nods for his actors along the way.
   
   With the help of exclusive interviews with family, colleagues, and friends, author Maura Spiegel provides a vibrant portrait of the life and work of this extraordinary director whose influence is felt through generations, and takes us inside the Federal Theater, the Group Theatre, the Actors Studio, and the early “golden age” of television.
   
   From his surprising personal life, with four marriages to remarkable women—all of whom opened their living rooms to Lumet’s world of artists and performers like Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson—to the world of Yiddish theater and Broadway spectacles, Sidney Lumet: A Life is a book that anyone interested in American film of the twentieth century will not want to miss.
   
   She has lectured on Narrative Medicine in Venice, London, Dublin, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Baroda, India, and in cities around the U.S. She co-authored The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2017); The Grim Reader: Writings on Death, Dying and Living on (Anchor/Doubleday), The Breast Book: An Intimate and Curious History (Workman), which was a Book-of-the-Month Club-Quality Paperbacks selection; she edited and introduced new editions of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes for the Barnes & Noble Classics Series. With Rita Charon, MD, PhD, she edited the journal Literature and Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press) for seven years. She has written for The New York Times and Newsday and has published articles on the history of the emotions, Charles Dickens, Victorian fashion, diamonds in the movies, among many other topics. Her new biography on Sidney Lumet will be published by St. Martin's Press in December 2019.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250030153