About this item
He believed the dog was immortal. So begins Susan Orleans sweeping, powerfully moving account of Rin Tin Tins journey from orphaned puppy to movie star and international icon. Orlean, a staff writer at The New Yorker who has been hailed as a national treasure by The Washington Post, spent nearly ten years researching and reporting her most captivating book to date the story of a dog who was born in 1918 and never died. It begins on a battlefield in France during World War I, when a young American soldier, Lee Duncan, discovered a newborn German shepherd in the ruins of a bombed-out dog kennel. To Duncan, who came of age in an orphanage, the dogs survival was a miracle. He saw something in Rin Tin Tin that he felt compelled to share with the world. Duncan brought Rinty home to California, where the dogs athleticism and acting ability drew the attention of Warner Bros.
About the Author
I'm the product of a happy and uneventful childhood in the suburbs of Cleveland, followed by a happy and pretty eventful four years as a student at University of Michigan. From there, I wandered to the West Coast, landing in Portland, Oregon, where I managed (somehow) to get a job as a writer. This had been my dream, of course, but I had no experience and no credentials. What I did have, in spades, was an abiding passion for storytelling and sentence-making. I fell in love with the experience of writing, and I've never stopped. From Portland, I moved to Boston, where I wrote for the Phoenix and the Globe, and then to New York, where I began writing for magazines, and, in 1987, published my first piece in The New Yorker. I've been a staff writer there since 1992.
