Brooklyn, Talent Magnet of the 20th Century
(Today's Episode: 1940)

I'd been meaning to get in touch with Sherill Tippins for a while to talk about February House, her chronicle of the year that W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee spent together in a Brooklyn townhouse--the kind of story you couldn't make up for fear nobody would believe you, but it's all true. I'd even tried to set Tippins up for one of the first Author2Author dialogues, but then the other writer I had in mind got assigned to review February House... Anyway, with a little help from Liz Penn, the two of us finally met for lunch earlier this week. We chatted a bit about the Readerville forum, where fans are peppering her with questions about the people and the period; she joked that the conversation was taking some unexpected turns, such as the fascination with how everyone smoked in the '40s--and glamorously, at that. We chatted a little bit about my film book, too, which is how I discovered that she'd worked for Dino De Laurentiis after graduating from college. (She also cowrote, and ended up production managing, a low-budget comedy that starred a young Brent Spiner and the playwright Leonard Melfi.)

After an appropriately timed review by Amanda Vaill in NYTBR two months ago, February House has been picking up steam recently. In early March, Michael Upchurch (Seattle Times) observed that Tippins "maintains a near-perfect balance in presenting each of [her subjects'] cases with clarity, humor and insight." (His review got picked up all over the place, too, from Detroit to Tallahassee.) And just last week, Rex Roberts (Washington Times), who lives near the site the actual February House once stood*, notes that Tippins "mixes gossip with exegesis like a seasoned biographer." Sometime during all this, Dennis Drabelle called the book an "irresistible bonbon" in WaPo, though I had a hell of a time trying to find the original link and had to settle for a reprint in the San Jose Mercury News. Without launching into full-on reviewer mode, I think it's pretty swell, ranking up there with Frederic Morton as far as pop history/group biography is concerned.

* Tippins used to live in that neighborhood as well, until she and her husband moved into Manhattan, where they have a first-floor space in what used to be the headquarters of one of the more prominent avant-garde movements in New York during the '60s.