In bringing biography and celebrity together, the essays in Making Stars interrogate contemporary and current understandings of each. Although biography was not invented in the eighteenth century, the period saw the emergence of works that focus on individuals who are interesting as much, if not more, for their everyday, lived experience than for their status or actions. At the same time, celebrity emerged as public fascination for the private lives of publicly visible individuals...

When I am in doubt, I talk with Cornelia; and while I am with her, my uncertainties disappear. But this subject she herself broached, at her home in one of those paradises of wood and water where Americans of her class have learned to hide their lives—for the summer. She is a young woman of forty-five, with what Hazlitt somewhere calls a “coronet face,” finely cut and proudly borne, and it gives one a feeling of distinction merely to be in her presence. My memory holds like a piece of radi...

Stuart Pratt Sherman (1881-1926) was an American literary critic, educator and journalist, known for having been an advocate of the "Nativist" movement in American literature, which defended traditional modes of American literature against Modernism.From Sherman’s fundamental literary collection Critical Woodcuts, published in New York in 1926, we have drawn the study Pierre Loti and Exotic Love, which today we propose to modern readers. It’s a short essay dedicate...

Stuart Pratt Sherman (1881-1926) was an American literary critic, educator and journalist, known for having been an advocate of the "Nativist" movement in American literature, which defended traditional modes of American literature against Modernism.From Sherman’s fundamental literary collection Critical Woodcuts, published in New York in 1926, we have drawn the study Chekhov, Chekhovians, Chekhovism, which today we propose to modern readers. It’s a short essay ded...

Although George Bernard Shaw quipped that "the Germans lack talent for two things: revolution and crime novels," there is a long tradition of German crime fiction; it simply hasn't aligned itself with international trends. Duringthe 1920s, German-language writers dispensed with the detective and focused instead on criminals, a trend that did not take hold in other countries until after 1945, by which time Germany had gone on to produce antidetective novels that were similarly ahead of thei...

Stuart Pratt Sherman (1881-1926) was an American literary critic, educator and journalist, known for having been an advocate of the "Nativist" movement in American literature, which defended traditional modes of American literature against Modernism.From Sherman’s fundamental literary collection Critical Woodcuts, published in New York in 1926, we have drawn the study Oscar Wilde. A dandy of letters and acquainted with grief, which today we propose to modern reader...