I’ve been fascinated by celebrities and heroes ever since I was a child. That compulsion became something I wanted to understand. I got my chance as the head editor of People magazine. Over the years, I met more than my share of celebrities – Ronald Reagan, Tom Hanks, Malcolm X, and Princess Diana, to name only a few. I began to take notes about my brushes with fame and think about celebrities in history and why they have recently become so dominant in our culture. Celebrity Nation is the result. Enjoy it!
I wrote
Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved into a Culture of Fans and Followers
Daniel Boorstin’s The Image is an amazing study by the former Librarian of Congress that first set in place many of the ideas about celebrities that are still with us today.
“The celebrity is a person who is known for [their] well-knowness,” Boorstin wrote. He describes “pseudo-events”, the manufactured illusions that we mistake for reality in a media-saturated world.
Drawing on examples like Charles Lindbergh, Boorstin shows how we come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety. Thus, the heroes of the past are blurred before our eyes and eventually disappear.
The Image is the first book I read about celebrity and it remains one of the best.
First published in 1962, this wonderfully provocative book introduced the notion of “pseudo-events”—events such as press conferences and presidential debates, which are manufactured solely in order to be reported—and the contemporary definition of celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” Since then Daniel J. Boorstin’s prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any reader who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths.
When I decided to write about celebrity, I knew from the beginning that I would depend on Richard Schickel’s His Picture in the Papers. Schickel was the former movie reviewer for both LIFE and TIME magazines,and I used simply enjoy his perceptive insights when I also worked at TIME. Schickel uses the case study of the charismatic Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. to show how his celebrity was generated by his image reproduced in movies, magazines, and newspapers.
Schickel later wrote Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America, which further discussed how celebrity images have replaced the value of ideas in American culture.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Neal Gabler is one of our most astute cultural critics.
I met him when I invited him to be my guest in a Princeton seminar called “Writing about Popular Culture.”
He talked compellingly about his books like Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity and An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, which carefully examined the inner workings of entertainment and celebrity.
In Life: The Movie, Gabler takes the argument even further, drawing on examples ranging from Elizabeth Taylor and Tom Cruise to Princess Diana and Oprah Winfrey to show how celebrity hagiography has turned everything from news to religion and politics into an inescapable public entertainment.
The story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, and melodrama has turned everything—news, politics, religion, high culture—into one vast public entertainment.
Neal Gabler calls them "lifies," those blockbusters written in the medium of life that dominate the media and the national conversation for weeks, months, even years: the death of Princess Diana, the trial of O.J. Simpson, Kenneth Starr vs. William Jefferson Clinton. Real Life as Entertainment is hardly a new phenomenon, but the movies, and now the new information technologies, have so accelerated it that it is now the reigning popular art form. How this came to…
The sociologist Joshua Gamson was among the first to analyze the effects of television on our image of celebrityhood.
In Claims to Fame, he rebels against the democratization of fame and is nostalgic for the days before fame was divorced from merit.
He cites Clifford Geertz’s classic The Interpretation of Cultures to make the point that celebrities are “a powerless elite” with high status and visibility but literally no power of any kind over audiences.
And now, of course, in the age of social media, these discrepancies are magnified.
Moving from "People" magazine to publicists' offices to tours of stars' homes, Joshua Gamson investigates the larger-than-life terrain of American celebrity culture. In the first major academic work since the early 1940s to seriously analyze the meaning of fame in American life, Gamson begins with the often-heard criticisms that today's heroes have been replaced by pseudoheroes, that notoriety has become detached from merit. He draws on literary and sociological theory, as well as interviews with celebrity-industry workers, to untangle the paradoxical nature of an American popular culture that is both obsessively invested in glamour and fantasy yet also aware of…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
If you are looking for an “Eureka!” moment while reading about celebrity, you can start with Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, first published in 2000 and re-issued with a new preface in 2020.
Putnam convincingly shows how Americans have become increasingly disconnected – from bowling leagues, from PTAs, neighborhood associations, from all forms of membership organizations.
Why did this happen? Putnam blames television and now the fragmented internet for the decline in these civic assets. I think that, more specifically, celebrity has become the opiate of the masses.
Celebrity worship has become a weapon of mass distraction. We suffer from an excess of individualism that will not end until we begin to accept and embrace the common good we all share.
When you combine the rise of celebrity with the decline of civic assets, that’s America today.
Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work -- but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, Bowling Alone, which The Economist hailed as "a prodigious achievement."
Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans' changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures -- whether they be PTA, church, or political parties -- have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our…
Celebrity Nation is a vivid history of celebrity culture written by Landon Jones, the former editor of People magazine. Jones draws on his personal experiences to explore why fame no longer stems only from heroic achievements but from the number of “likes” and shares—and what this means for American culture today. Jones brings a personal perspective to fame and its dark underbelly, complicated by the arrival of the internet and social media.
Jones enlivens his account with profiles of celebrities he knew personally, ranging from Malcolm X to Princess Diana, as well as observations about contemporary social media stars like Kim Kardashian, to show how celebrity has been wielded as a weapon of mass distraction to spawn narcissism, harm, and loneliness.
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
The plan was insane. The trap seemed to snap shut on Bruce and Maggie Tate, an isolation forced on them by the pandemic and America's growing political factionalism. Something had to change.
Maggie's surprising answer: buy a boat, learn to pilot it, and embark on the Great Loop. With no…
