About this item
In 1936, life on the road means sleeping on the bus or in hotels for blacks only. After finishing her tour with Nobel Sissel's orchestra, nineteen-year-old Lena Horne is walking the last few blocks to her father's hotel in Pittsburgh's Hill District. She stops at a lemonade stand and meets a Lebanese American girl, Marie David. Marie loves movies and adores Lena, and their chance meeting sparks a relationship that will intertwine their lives forever. Lena also meets Josiah Conner, a charismatic teenager who helps out at her father Teddy's hotel. Josiah often skips school, dreams of being a Hollywood director, and has a crush on Lena. Although the three are linked by a determination to be somebody, issues of race, class, family, and education threaten to disrupt their lives and the bonds between them. Lena's father wants her to settle down and give up show business, but she's entranced by the music and culture of the Hill. It's a mecca for jazz singers and musicians, and nightspots like the Crawford Grill attract crowds of blacks and whites. Lena table-hops with local jazzmen as her father chaperones her through the clubs where she'll later perform. Singing makes her feel alive, and to her father's dismay, reviewers can't get enough of her. Duke Ellington adores her, Billy Strayhorn can't wait to meet her, and she becomes "all the rage" in clubs and Hollywood for her beauty and almost-whiteness. Her signature version of "Stormy Weather" makes her a legend. But after sitting around for years at MGM as the studio heads try to figure out what to do with her, she isn't quite sure what she's worth. Marie and Josiah follow Lena's career in Hollywood and New York through movie magazines and the Pittsburgh Courier. Years pass until their lives are brought together again when Josiah is arrested for the murder of a white man. Marie and Lena decide they must get Josiah out of prison - whatever the personal cost.
About the Author
Kathleen George is the best selling author of a series of thrillers set in Pittsburgh where she lives and where she is a professor of theatre at the University of Pittsburgh. Her sixth novel SIMPLE (August 21, 2012) and her fifth novel HIDEOUT (August 16, 2011) have both won high praise by reviewers, including starred reviews. Her fourth, THE ODDS, out in paperback, was a finalist for an Edgar® award for best novel of the year in 2010. She is also the author of the acclaimed novels TAKEN, FALLEN, and AFTERIMAGE, the short story collection THE MAN IN THE BUICK, and the 2011 edited collection of stories, PITTSBURGH NOIR. Early on George Pelecanos wrote "I look forward to reading anything Kathleen George writes." An Entertainment Weekly reviewer wrote of THE ODDS, "If anyone is writing better police thrillers than George, I don't know who it is."
She is married to writer Hilary Masters, who asked her out twenty years ago because he figured she, a theatre director, would be interesting--he was tired of being around writers. On the first date, she told him she had begun writing (or more accurately had taken it up again, having said from the time she was seven that she wanted to be a writer) .
He thought, "Oh, no, not another one." But they had already hit it off and so it was too late. Now there are two of them in one household, shuffling around in sloppy clothes, coffee cups in hand, heading to paper, computer, typewriter.
"When I was eight, I took my accumulated miseries up to the attic," she wrote in "The Making of a Writer" "where I had discovered I could make an area, (a small stage set? ) with table, chair, notebooks and pen, and suddenly my world seemed whole and good--a secret and a treasure."
*******Detailed media bio and photos:
Kathleen George was born in Johnstown Pennsylvania. As a child, she wanted to be a writer. She wrote stories and plays in high school and in her undergraduate years as a creative writing major at the University of Pittsburgh. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Theatre (also at Pitt) . By then she had made her home in Pittsburgh. For eight years she taught theatre at Carlow College, where she directed many plays. Then she accepted a teaching position at Pitt where she continued to direct and teach dramatic literature and playwriting; in the early 80s, she began to add fiction writing back into the mix. In 1988, she earned an M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing (also at Pitt!) on the side. She is a Professor in the Theatre Arts Department with a secondary appointment in the English Writing program.
Book-length fiction publications are: THE MAN IN THE BUICK, a collection of stories, BKMK press, 1999; TAKEN, a novel, Delacorte 2001; FALLEN, Dell 2004; AFTERIMAGE, St. Martin's Minotaur 2007; THE ODDS, St. Martin's Minotaur 2009; HIDEOUT St. Martin's Minotaur
