True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee
(Sprache: Englisch)
The definitive, revelatory biography of Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee, a writer and entrepreneur who reshaped global pop culture at a steep personal cost
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The definitive, revelatory biography of Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee, a writer and entrepreneur who reshaped global pop culture at a steep personal costHUGO AWARD FINALIST EISNER AWARD NOMINEE A biography that reads like a thriller or a whodunit . . . scrupulously honest, deeply damning, and sometimes even heartbreaking. Neil Gaiman
Stan Lee was one of the most famous and beloved entertainers to emerge from the twentieth century. He served as head editor of Marvel Comics for three decades and, in that time, became known as the creator of more pieces of internationally recognizable intellectual property than nearly anyone: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther, the Incredible Hulk . . . the list goes on. His carnival-barker marketing prowess helped save the comic-book industry and superhero fiction. His cameos in Marvel movies have charmed billions. When he died in 2018, grief poured in from around the world, further cementing his legacy.
But what if Stan Lee wasn t who he said he was? To craft the definitive biography of Lee, Abraham Riesman conducted more than 150 interviews and investigated thousands of pages of private documents, turning up never-before-published revelations about Lee s life and work. True Believer tackles tough questions: Did Lee actually create the characters he gained fame for creating? Was he complicit in millions of dollars worth of fraud in his post-Marvel life? Which members of the cavalcade of grifters who surrounded him were most responsible for the misery of his final days?
And, above all, what drove this man to achieve so much yet always boast of more?
Lese-Probe zu „True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee “
OvertureWhat It Takes
We cannot know for certain whether Sofie and Zanfir Solomon saw the celebrity when he returned, but we may presume they got word of his arrival soon enough. It was the bitter winter of 1899 and the couple were in their mid-thirties, married for sixteen years and raising a growing nest of children. Their home county, Vaslui, was a sparsely populated chunk of land in eastern Romania, containing just over 110,000 people, roughly 6,800 of them Jews like the Solomons, all of them struggling through a devastating recession. But even in the long, bleak nights, there was cause for excitement in the local Jewish community: The prodigal son was on his way.
For months before, if you had put your ear to the ground, you might have heard the distant rumble of his approach, and Vaslui held not only its ear to the ground, but its breath, wrote Marcus Eli Ravage, a Vasluiander of the Solomons era. On the street, in the market, at the synagogue, we kept asking one another the one question, When will he arrive? At last, the long-anticipated landsman rode a midnight train into town, and on his finely tailored frock coat lay the scarcely visible dust of a place the Solomons may have heard of but could barely imagine; a place where the laws of the Old World didn t apply (perhaps even the laws of physics given that it was on the other side of the world, it was said that people walked upside down there); a place where a Jew could be whatever he saw fit to be. I had heard of people going to Vienna and Germany and Paris, and even to England for business or pleasure, but no one, to my knowledge, had ever gone to America of his own free will, Ravage continued. And yet here was one of their own, back from fourteen years in what they called Nev-York, decked out in finery such as they d never seen.
The streets were lined with craning, round-eyed, tiptoeing Vasluianders, open-mouthed peasants, and gay-attired holiday visitors from neighboring
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towns who, having heard of the glory that had come to Vaslui, had driven in in their ox-carts and dog-carts to partake of it, Ravage recalled. Perhaps Zanfir and Sofie and their nine-year-old daughter, Celia, were among the rubberneckers; if so, they would have been astounded by the man s diamonds, his capacity to rattle off words in the alien tongue of English, and his trunkful of presents: There were railways that were wound up like clocks and ran around in their tracks like real trains, and dancing negroes, and squawking dolls, and jews -harps, and scores of other delights for the palate as well as the fancy, Ravage reported. The returnee said he was working for the American government in a high post and, though he maintained a humble demeanor, he alluded to a significant fortune. Surely the Solomons heard tell of what happened when the man went to synagogue on Saturday: He received the honor of an aliyah an opportunity to recite a blessing alongside the holy scrolls of the Torah which came with the obligation to make a donation, and instead of the customary three or four francs, the man calmly offered 125 of them. From that day on, wrote Ravage, Vaslui became a changed town. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone had the notion to pack up and leave.
But wait. Was it true that, as one local with information from overseas said, the man was wildly exaggerating his success? Sure. Did Ravage later find out that this revered individual whom he nicknamed Couza, a Romanian word denoting royalty was actually a mere foreman in a bedspring factory, his wife a dressmaker, and his palatial New York estate just a fraction of a flat? Of course. Did any of that matter? Not one jot. There was a country somewhere beyond the seas where a man was a man in spite of his rel
But wait. Was it true that, as one local with information from overseas said, the man was wildly exaggerating his success? Sure. Did Ravage later find out that this revered individual whom he nicknamed Couza, a Romanian word denoting royalty was actually a mere foreman in a bedspring factory, his wife a dressmaker, and his palatial New York estate just a fraction of a flat? Of course. Did any of that matter? Not one jot. There was a country somewhere beyond the seas where a man was a man in spite of his rel
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Autoren-Porträt von Abraham Riesman
Abraham Josephine Riesman is a Providence-based journalist, writing primarily for New York magazine about arts and culture. Her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, and Vice, among other publications.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Abraham Riesman
- 2022, 432 Seiten, Maße: 13,1 x 20,2 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Crown
- ISBN-10: 0593135733
- ISBN-13: 9780593135730
- Erscheinungsdatum: 14.11.2022
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Thunderous. The New York Review of BooksIlluminating . . . A well-researched, engrossing and compulsively readable book. Los Angeles Times
Tantalizing . . . Riesman puts in the hard yards to separate fact from myth. Dorian Lynskey, The Spectator
Revelatory. USA Today
An illuminating and reliable account of Lee s improbable odyssey. Jacob Heilbrunn,
Washington Monthly
Striking . . . True Believer paints a portrait of a man who was just as flawed as his heroes, and he emerges all the more human for it. . . . [Riesman is] a must-read chronicler of the comic book industry. The Hollywood Reporter
For those who know Stan Lee from his sunny, funny cameos in Marvel films, get ready for an unputdownable deep dive. The man lived a life warts and all and Riesman captures the shadow and sunshine in equal measure. Patton Oswalt
True Believer is in every imaginable way the biography that Stan Lee deserves ambitious, audacious, daring, and unflinchingly clear-eyed about the man s significance, his shortcomings, his transgressions, his accomplishments, and his astonishing legacy. Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road
Stan Lee was a mythmaker, both creatively and autobiographically. To reach the truth of his troubled and troubling life story, Riesman has had to peel away layers of quarrel, exaggeration, credit-grabbing, dispute, and faulty memory. The result is an enthralling, vibrantly written portrait of one of American popular culture's great innovators." Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back
The story of Stan Lee is a wild ride, sometimes breathtaking, often shocking but it is also a wholly American one, rooted in the transformation of hardscrabble reality into glorious dreams, of legends into truth, of absence into action, of immigration into assimilation. Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita
Stan Lee was,
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all at once, a genius, a schlepper, a hack, a huckster, a marvel. Riesman painstakingly dug into how much credit each of those overlapping personae deserves, and then he spun all those threads into a book that reads with the supple speed of Mr. Fantastic himself. Chris Bonanos, author of Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous
A life rich with unexpected turns and a biography filled with personality. In looking at a man who created heroic stories for a living, Riesman bravely examines the trace lines underneath the legends of his life. The result is a startling, fresh portrait of a truly American career. Nathan Heller, author of The Private Order
Jam-packed with carefully compiled evidence of just how much delectable bullshit, staggering failure, and vicious backbiting goes into the making of a great American genius. I genuinely could not put it down." Penny Lane, director of Hail Satan?
Take it from someone who has always found comic books alluring but knew next to nothing about the medium s history before reading True Believer: this book will pull you in no matter what level of knowledge or built-in curiosity you bring to it. Leon Neyfakh, co-creator of Slow Burn and Fiasco
A life rich with unexpected turns and a biography filled with personality. In looking at a man who created heroic stories for a living, Riesman bravely examines the trace lines underneath the legends of his life. The result is a startling, fresh portrait of a truly American career. Nathan Heller, author of The Private Order
Jam-packed with carefully compiled evidence of just how much delectable bullshit, staggering failure, and vicious backbiting goes into the making of a great American genius. I genuinely could not put it down." Penny Lane, director of Hail Satan?
Take it from someone who has always found comic books alluring but knew next to nothing about the medium s history before reading True Believer: this book will pull you in no matter what level of knowledge or built-in curiosity you bring to it. Leon Neyfakh, co-creator of Slow Burn and Fiasco
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