Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture

by Leo Braudy

Native Informant is Leo Braudy's first book after his widely acclaimed and award-winning history of fame, The Frenzy of Renown . With a verve that breaks down the boundaries between film, literature, and popular culture, Braudy discusses writers and filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Daniel
Defoe, Ernst Lubitsch, Emile Zola, Susan Sontag, and Richard Condon. His subjects include madness in the eighteenth century, the Hollywood blacklist, westerns, and pornography. Throughout this lively and insightful collection, his perspective is not that of the critic as a detached voice of
professional authority but as a member of a particular culture--a native informant--whose gaze looks simultaneously inward and outward, subjective but self-aware. Like the wide-ranging Frenzy of Renown , Native Informant will appeal to specialist and interested reader alike.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 10, 1991

About the author

Leo Braudy is among America's leading cultural historians and film critics. He currently is University Professor and Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.