Annal:1996 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
- 1997 Pulitzer–Biography winner
- 1996 LATimes–Biography winner
- 1996 NBCC–Biography winner
- Score: 30.47
“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father,…
Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu
- 1996 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.46
Possibly only an actor and director as deeply familiar with the theater as Simon Callow, and as determined as he to capture the protean Welles whole, could have written this biography, of which The Road to Xanadu is the first volume. For here, brilliantly located in its historical and social setting, is the entire, magnificent, unbelievable story—the prodigious childhood; the dynamic young man in New York, in some ways still a boy, in others a profound theatrical innovator; the fraught partnership with John Houseman; the groundbreaking triumphs of the…
Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams
- 1996 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.46
Considered by many to be the greatest artist of the American theatre, Tennessee Williams has been described by those who knew him as shy and aggressive, lucid and manic, accessible and elusive, kind and cruel, but always enigmatic. Until now, little has been known of Williams’s youth and the true forces that influenced and helped create the persona of Tennessee Williams.
Lyle Leverich, chosen by the playwright himself as his biographer, has been given exclusive access to letters, diaries and journals, unpublished manuscripts, and family documents and has…
Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography
- 1996 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.46
In the art of Edward Hopper (1882-1967), tense, unhappy men and women, in whom we recognize something of our neighbors and ourselves, play out mysterious dramas in silent, stripped-down spaces—stages raked by an unrelenting and revealing light. These paintings, and Hopper’s equally evocative landscapes and houses, make us wonder: what kind of man had this haunting vision, and what kind of life engendered this art?
No one is better qualified to answer these questions than the art historian Gail Levin, author of the major studies of Hopper’s work (including the…
William Morris: A Life for Our Time
- 1996 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.46
Since his death in 1896, William Morris has come to be regarded as one of the giants of the nineteenth century. But his genius was so many-sided and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time, possibly of all time, could also be internationally renowned as a founder of the socialist movement, and could have been ranked as a poet together with Tennyson and Browning.
With penetrating insight, Fiona MacCarthy has managed to encompass all the different facets of…
Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett
- 1996 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.46
In the first dual biography of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, New York Times bestselling author Joan Mellen sheds new light on two of the twentieth century’s most intriguing characters. The first biographer to draw from the Hellman-Hammett archives at the University of Texas, and with unprecedented access to their circle of friends, Mellen taps mines of fresh material to produce a groundbreaking look at these extraordinary American nonconformists, separately and together.
Cutting against the social and political grain of their day, Hellman and…
An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick
- 1996 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.46
Drawing on a vast amount of original family documents, including more than 7,000 letters between the Empress and the Queen, Pakula offers an absorbing portrait of a brilliant, determined woman.
Vicky, as she was known to her family and friends, was trained by her father, Prince Albert, in the principles of constitutional monarchy and parliamentary government. Sent to Germany with the mission of carrying these liberal concepts back to the land of Albert’s birth, the seventeen-year-old encountered the rigidities of a hidebound Prussian court and the “blood and…
A Life of Picasso: Volume 2. The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916
- 1996 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.46
In this volume we see the artist’s life and work during the crucial decade of 1907–17, a period during which Picasso and Georges Braque devised what has come to be known as cubism and in doing so engendered modernism. Thanks to the author’s friendship with Picasso and some of the women in his life, as well as Braque and their dealer, D. H. Kahnweiler, and other associates, he has had access to untapped sources and unpublished material. In The Cubist Rebel, Richardson also introduces us to key figures in Picasso’s life who have been totally overlooked by previous biographers. Among these are the artist’s Chilean patron, collector, and mother figure, Eugenia Errázuriz, as well as two fiancées: the loveable Geneviève Laporte and the promiscuous bisexual painter Irène Lagut.
