ISADORA:
A SENSATIONAL LIFE
The greatest dancer of her time, Isadora Duncan
invented her own language to express the spirit and world-wide hope of American
democracy. A pioneer in the dance world
and the women's movement, her name is synonymous with originality, spontaneity,
and intrigue. "Art meant
Isadora," said John Dos Passos: "Art was whatever Isadora
did." Finally, here is a biography
that does justice to the life of this unforgettable woman. Here is her full life: her many loves, her passion
for her art, her sensational performances, and her personal tragedies — set
against the sweeping backdrop of
"We
may never know whether 'one must have seen Isadora Duncan to die
happy,' as one of her contemporaries claimed, but one way to live happily, at
least for a few days, is to read Peter Kurth's Isadora. Exhaustively researched, intelligently
rendered, it becomes, in its lovingly judicious and ultimately explosive
unfurling, the definitive portrait of this — in the words of one of the few men not her lover — 'figure of mourning and flame.'" — J. D. Landis, author of Longing
"The
most famous woman of the first quarter of the 20th century may have been Mary
Pickford, but the most influential, and the most notorious, was Isadora
Duncan. She was the progenitor and soul
of a new art form, modern dance. She was
the prototype of the uninhibited young American whose freshness and originality
charmed jaded old
"Peter
Kurth has written the best biography we have of an astonishing and often
underrated woman. He writes so well that
only the weight of paper will occasionally remind you of his subject’s
amplitude. … Working from an assembly of sources vast enough to make you dizzy,
he succeeds in making you love, hate and honor America’s greatest dancer,
sometimes all at once. Earlier
biographies have tended to focus on her, just as Isadora herself did. Kurth does better by giving vivid portraits
of the lovers, friends and pupils whose voices make up a diverse chorus. … Shrewdly, he gives space not only to
Isadora’s wonderfully feckless chum, Mary Desti, the creator of the scarf that
throttled her, but to Preston Sturges, Desti’s film-making son.
"Mr.
Kurth has … absorbed the material, like a dancer lodging choreography in muscle
memory, and distilled the considerable detail into an immensely readable and
poignant evocation of
"Peter Kurth has done a heroic job recreating this charismatic,
complicated and ultimately deeply tragic figure, born in the heyday of the
railroads and dead before the Great Depression.
Isadora: A Sensational Life — all 652 evocative,
authoritative, sumptuously detailed pages of it — will likely become the standard biography. Kurth seems to have read everything that has
been written about her; and while he lets critics, scholars and (most valuably)
those who saw her dance sum up the evanescent
“Today, almost 75 years after her death, Isadora Duncan's name is still
a household word (at least in some households). … One of the virtues of Peter
Kurth's excellent and engrossing new biography is to explain not only how this
happened, but why. … There was a purity and seriousness to
"The first definitive biography written of the woman who did for
movement what Picasso did for visual art…. Meticulously researched,
exhaustively detailed, intelligently and bouncingly written, with an eye to the
larger social and historical trends that enabled a genius like Isadora to make
such an explosive impact on the development of 20th-century art, Kurth quotes
source after source who saw her as the reincarnation
of the Great Mother figure. She nurtured
and she destroyed. Carnal urges drove
her — she lived toward the end of her life on a diet of booze and boys. But she was awesome, sacred as a cloud-ringed
mountaintop." — Deirdre Kelly, The Globe and Mail
(Toronto)
"I
would read anything written by Peter Kurth—his Anastasia had me walking round the house all day deep in the book
until it was finished. Now at last we have a thorough study of Isadora Duncan
which is compelling all the way to its terrifying conclusion." -- Hugo
Vickers, author of Cecil Beaton, Vivien Leigh,
Loving Garbo,
and The Private
World of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor
"A
delightful read, a riveting account, written with grace and style, of a
fascinating and extraordinary life." -- Gerald Clarke, author
of Get Happy: The Life of Judy
Garland and Capote: A Biography
FIRST
CHAPTER: “A BABY BOLSHEVIK”
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