Still Here

A New Yorker Favorite Nonfiction Book of the Year: A "genuinely irresistible" biography of Broadway legend Elaine Stritch ( Buffalo News). A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Still Here is the first full telling of Elaine Stritch's life. Rollicking but intimate, it tracks one of Broadway's great personalities from her upbringing in Detroit during the Great Depression to her fateful move to New York City, where she studied alongside Marlon Brando, Bea Arthur, and Harry Belafonte. We accompany Elaine through her jagged rise to fame, to Hollywood and London, and across her later years, when she enjoyed a stunning renaissance, punctuated by a turn on the popular television show 30 Rock. We explore the influential—and often fraught—collaborations she developed with Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, and above all Stephen Sondheim, as well as her courageous yet flawed attempts to control a serious drinking problem. And we see the entertainer triumphing over personal turmoil with the development of her Tony Award–winning one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, which established her as an emblem of spiky independence and Manhattan life for an entirely new generation of admirers. Following years of meticulous research and interviews, Alexandra Jacobs conveys the full force of Stritch's sardonic wit and brassy charm while acknowledging her many dark complexities—and creates a portrait of a powerful, vulnerable, honest, and humorous star of stage and screen. "Studded with juicy anecdotes." — The Washington Post "Provides a marvelous trip back in time to a Broadway that's gone forever . . . compulsively readable." — The Wall Street Journal "A chronicle of one impossible brilliant actor and the community around her, this biography provides a thoroughly entertaining and vividly drawn picture of show business in the 20th century." — The New York Times Book Review Includes photographs