America's Mistress: Eartha Kitt, Her Life and Times

Description

Eartha Kitt was a skinny, mixed-race woman with an odd, angular face, who seduced fifties white America into thinking that she was, in the words of Orson Welles, 'the most exciting woman in the world'. She could count Marilyn Monroe, T.S. Eliot, Prince Philip and Albert Einstein among her friends and admirers, and was almost able to forget she had once been a poor black girl from the Deep South. But her new persona was also a prison from which she found it impossible to escape. John L. Williams' moving and unsettling biography shows a star adrift in a bewildering new America torn apart by the Civil Rights movement. Shunned by many of her former friends, shocked by her country's insidious racism, and with a perilously fragile sense of her own identity, Eartha Kitt would pay the price that came from trying to be America's mistress.

John L. Williams is the author of five works of fiction including The Cardiff Trilogy and assorted non-fiction, such as his recent biographies of Shirley Bassey and the British Black Power leader, Michael X. He's a regular reviewer for the Independent and the Mail On Sunday, and the co-organiser of The Laugharne Weekend literary festival in West Wales. He lives and works in Cardiff.

'First-rate' Roger Lewis, Daily Mail. * Daily Mail * 'This intriguing book reveals the trail she blazed in American life - and the price she paid' Sunday Times. * Sunday Times * 'Well researched, elegantly written' Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday. * Mail on Sunday *