BARD COLLEGE PROFESSOR AND PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING BIOGRAPHER ELIZABETH FRANK MAKES LITERARY DEBUT Frank to Read from Cheat and Charmer at Merritt Books in Red Hook on October 23

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Bard College professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Elizabeth Frank will read from and sign copies of her first novel, Cheat and Charmer (Random House), at Merritt Books in Red Hook on Saturday, October 23, at 4 p.m. Twenty-five years in the making, Frank’s new work is an ambitious novel of marriage, sisterhood, art, politics, and betrayal set in Hollywood, New York, Paris, and London. The novel offers an insider’s perspective into the emotion, idealism, and politics of Hollywood’s golden age up to the blacklists of the McCarthy era. Frank, who is the daughter of writer, director, and producer Melvin Frank, has tried to bring to life the world of the movie industry she grew up in during the 1950s. Publisher’s Weekly calls Cheat and Charmer “a rich meditation on family, sex, responsibility, and betrayal. Frank does a stupendous job.” Actress Mia Farrow calls the work “magnificent,” and says that Frank “captures the lives of artists and the elite world of Hollywood royalty with authenticity, brilliance and heart.” Cheat and Charmer explores the lives of two sisters against the backdrop of Hollywood society at the end of the 1930s to the early 1950s. One sister, Veevi, flees to Paris with her husband, a filmmaker and high-profile communist. The other, Dinah, remains and is subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and forced to choose between ruining her husband’s career or testifying against Veevi. Elizabeth Frank is the Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Bard College. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1986 for Louise Bogan: A Portrait, she is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, Temple University, the Newbery Library, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In addition to her biography of Bogan, she is the author of Jackson Pollock and Esteban Vicente. She is the author of numerous articles on literature, art, and literary and art criticism in such publications as the New York Times Book Review, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Art in America, Partisan Review, New York Arts Journal, Salmagundi, Journal of Modern Literature, and ARTnews. She earned B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. # # # (10.14.04)

This event was last updated on 10-25-2004

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