Description
Chronicles Mae West's flamboyant eighty-year career, from her debut at age seven at a Brooklyn working-class theater through her early 1930s box-office stardom and her rediscovery in the 1960s and 1970s.
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When I'm Bad, I'm Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment is a portrait of an outrageous career that set the stage for future groundbreaking performers. Combining elements of biography, cultural analysis, and social history, author Marybeth Hamilton unmasks Mae West through the story of her public persona and the process of theatrical experimentation, commercial savvy, and sheer willpower by which West constructed herself. Though she has been sentimentalized in recent years, Mae West was a truly shocking performer who transgressed boundaries and set off spectacular controversies, which encapsulated the cultural confusions of her time and have powerful resonances for our own.
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