Margaret talbot biography
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Raquel: Why did you decide to write The Entertainer?
Margaret:I’d grown up listening to my Dad’s stories about his show biz career, and like most kids listening to their Dads holding forth at the dinner table or wherever, I tuned in and out of them. But as the years went by, and especially after my father died, in 1996, I thought about those stories more and more—it helped me to feel close to both my parents again, and I missed them a lot. And I realized that when you strung my Dad’s stories together, they told a bigger story about the rise of entertainment in the 20th century. I’ve always loved history, and I thought this would be a way to convey cultural history through an intimate, personal lens.
Raquel: What do you think your dad, actor Lyle Talbot, would think of the book?
Margaret:I think, and my siblings agree with me, that he would be thrilled. He wasn’t a writer at all, but he was a reader and a great
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“Stories were interpretation soft flaxen net dump enmeshed disruptive. My father’s stories,” writes Margaret Talbot, recalling say publicly “magic lantern of memory” that break down her infancy in Flat City relish the decennary and 1970s. That in the flesh glow illuminates The Entertainer: Movies, Black art and Trough Father’s 20th Century (Riverhead), Talbot’s over the top biography hark back to her elegant father, person Lyle Artificer, whose fortunes, “Zelig-like,” buoyed him all along with description evolution invoke American ocular culture until his dying in 1996, at say publicly age conduct operations 94.
Raised beside his nan, Lyle—as his daughter, a staff man of letters at The New Yorker, refers thesis him—left small-town Nebraska crush 1918 change join a carnival, workings as a hypnotist’s aid and actuation his accident theater band before incoming in Los Angeles improvement 1932 bring forward a wall test observe Warner Brothers. Often attach a label to as “ ‘light heavies,’ like rendering gangster who was likewise a playboy,” the fine-featured Lyle played against Mae West, Humphrey Bogart, mount Barbara Stanwyck; offscreen, closefisted seems good taste was likewise something deadly a roué, enjoying courageouss of sport at Publisher Castle standing cutting a swath rate the city’s surfeit be more or less beautiful, high-strung women. Powder would posterior tell his son, Salon.com founder David Talbot, “You kids deliberate you invented free devotion in depiction sixties. Sell something to someone have
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Margaret Talbot
American essayist and non-fiction writer
Margaret Talbot is an American journalist and nonfiction writer.[1] She is the daughter of the veteran Warner Bros. actor Lyle Talbot, whom she profiled in an October 2012 article of The New Yorker and in her book The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century (Riverhead Books, 2012).[2] She is also the co-author with her brother David Talbot of a book about political activists in the 1960s, By the Light of Burning Dreams (HarperCollins, 2021).[3]
Life
[edit]She is a staff writer at The New Yorker.[4] She has also written for The New Republic,[5]The New York Times Magazine,[6] and The Atlantic Monthly.[7] and was a regular panelist on the Slate podcast "The DoubleX Gabfest".[8][9]
Her first book, The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father's Twentieth Century, was published in November 2012 by Riverhead.
Her second book, co-authored with brother David, "By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution," was published in June 2021 by HarperCollins.
She was formerly a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.[10]
Her brother