West of Eden

One of the best books ever written about the movies. * Daily Telegraph, Book of the Year #1 *
Selective and sly, personal and political – and by far one of the best books ever written about Hollywood… The stories are vivid and the voices as clear as if the speakers were still alive… Like reading a secret diary and looking at a geologist’s diagram at the same time: with each intimate revelation, the precise stratification of the world’s most glamorous and closed society becomes clear. – Gaby Wood * Daily Telegraph *
The best book ever done on the terrifying social dysfunction of the beautiful people… [Stein] is clear-eyed and knows where the bodies are buried… Though all “true”, this book reads like a dream… A spellbinding record of that ancien régime. – David Thomson * New Statesman *
The dark side of Tinseltown – the fame, the fortunes, the secrets – told by those in the know… Stein edits together the dizzying array of interviews she has collected, weaving them into a subtly revealing oral history that illuminates Hollywood life from the 1920s to the 1990s. – Victoria Segal * Sunday Times *
A gripping story of money, power and fame… Highly entertaining stuff packed with memorable anecdotes. – Sebastian Shakespeare * Tatler *
A saga, like Steinbeck’s version of Genesis, about family squabbles and sins passed down, along with money, from one generation to the next. – Peter Conrad * Observer *
Absorbing oral history of Hollywood… A tantilisingly intimate portrait of a handful of families whose very different experiences together sum up Tinseltown to a T. – Brian Viner * Daily Mail *
Stein’s style is addictive: briskly intercut (rarely does one voice claim a full page), unafraid that gossipy asides will lessen its gravity. And like Chandler, like James Ellroy, like Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon and Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, West of Eden sees something primally rotten in the bedrock of the city. – Danny Leigh * Financial Times *
This is the book Hollywood has been waiting for… Gripping and stealthily emotive… An astonishing collection of voices… Read this and you’ll never turn onto Doheny Drive in the sunshine again without thinking about this gilded, glittering city’s identity as a fascinating and troubled invention of the 20th century. – Olivia Cole * GQ *
Jean Stein’s book deploys a wonderful grace in uncovering a monstrous reality – it tells brilliant stories, sometimes very personal ones, and lets their accretion work its own magic… A wild compendium of stories about what it is to be a child in a world of childish adults, and her book feels political, a meditation on the moral consequences of being looked after by powerful monsters with sick egos. – Andrew O’Hagan * London Review of Books *

Jean Stein’s father, Jules, founded MCA and she grew up in the golden years of Hollywood. At Jean’s coming-out party, Judy Garland sang ‘Over the Rainbow’; later she had an affair with William Faulkner, became an editor at The Paris Review, and was Elia Kazan’s assistant on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Immersed in the demi-monde of New York, she was close to Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, and to Warhol’s muse - Edie Sedgewick - about whom Lou Reed wrote ‘Femme Fatale’ and Jean Stein wrote Edie (1982). That book became an international best-seller, of which Norman Mailer wrote- ‘This is the book of the Sixties that we have been waiting for.’

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