About this item
The Catskills ("Cat Creek" in Dutch) , America's original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five counties - Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, Ulster, Schoharie; America's first great vacationland; the subject of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings that captured the almost godlike majesty of the mountains and landscapes, the skies, waterfalls, pastures, cliffs . . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tycoons and politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians and spiritualists, outcasts and rebels . . . Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver tell of the turning points that made the Catskills so vital to the development of America: Henry Hudson's first spotting the distant blue mountains in 1609; the New York State constitutional convention, resulting in New York's own Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and its own constitution, causing the ire of the invading British army .
About the Author
STEPHEN M. SILVERMAN is the author of 13 books, including The Amusement Park: 900 Years of Thrills and Spills, and the Dreamers and Schemers Behind Them (May 2019) ; The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America; Funny Ladies: 100 Years of Great Comediennes; and the critically acclaimed biographies of the filmmakers David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia) and Stanley Donen (Singin' in the Rain) , featuring introductions by Katharine Hepburn and Audrey Hepburn, respectively. His work has appeared in Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, the New York Times, The Times of London, Smithsonian, Vogue, and the Washington Post. He is a 20-year veteran of Time Inc., and for nine years taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. His first job was selling ice cream in Disneyland.
