Hollywood Historian Tripp Whetsell Releases Norman Lear His Life And Times
Manage episode 457333526 series 3142017
Norman Lear: His Life & Times, the first comprehensive biography of the eponymous TV pioneer by show business historian, entertainment journalist and author Tripp Whetsell, will be released by Applause Books on November 11th.
Hailed by Publisher's Weekly as a "fitting tribute to a consequential figure in television history," it is the first in-depth biography of the iconic writer, producer and social activist, who beginning in the early 1970s, forever altered America's television landscape with such groundbreaking situation comedies as All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
While much has been written about Lear, Whetsell demonstrates there is still a lot more to be learned about "the man in the white hat," who was arguably the first behind-the-scenes television figure to become a bona fide celebrity in his own right, whose multi-award-winning taboo-busting sitcoms averaged as many as 120 million viewers a week during their peak.
Whetsell currently teaches the only college-level course about Lear and his classic sitcoms at their alma mater, Boston's Emerson College, in which Lear appeared as a guest via Zoom twice. He was also the only journalist to interview Lear exclusively for a 40th anniversary retrospective of All in the Family for TV Guide in 2001.
From his birth in New Haven, Connecticut in July 1922 right up until his death in Los Angeles in December 2023 at the age of 101, Lear's life is told in thorough, meticulous detail with unflinching candor
7272 jaksoa