Edie
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407053295
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464
Categories:

Edie

An American Biography

Formats & editions
EBook
1 July 2010
Paperback
6 Feb 2020
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A brilliant and unique biography of Andy Warhol's tragic muse, the 60s icon Edie Sedgwick, by the writer Jean Stein

A brilliant and unique biography of Andy Warhol's tragic muse, the 60s icon Edie Sedgwick

‘Exceptionally seductive… You can’t put it down’ LA Times
Outrageous, vulnerable and strikingly beautiful - in the 1960s Edie Sedgwick became both an emblem of, and a memorial to, the doomed world spawned by Andy Warhol.

Born into a wealthy New England Edie’s childhood was dominated by a brutal but glamourous father. Fleeing to New York, she became an instant celebrity, known to everyone in the literary, artistic and fashionable worlds. She was Warhol's twin soul, his creature, the superstar of his films and, finally, the victim of a life which he created for her.

Jean Stein’s classic biography of Edie is an American fable on an epic scale - the story of a short, crowded and vivid life which is also the story of a decade like no other.

‘Edie Sedgwick was the spirit of the sixties, and these pages capture her power to dazzle us… This is the book of the Sixties we have been waiting for’ Norman Mailer
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407053295
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464
Categories:

About the authors

Jean Stein

Jean Stein’s father, Jules, founded MCA and she grew up in the golden years of Hollywood. At Jean’s coming-out party, Judy Garland sang ‘Over the Rainbow’; later she had an affair with William Faulkner, became an editor at The Paris Review, and was Elia Kazan’s assistant on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Immersed in the demi-monde of New York, she was close to Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, and to Warhol’s muse – Edie Sedgewick – about whom Lou Reed wrote ‘Femme Fatale’ and Jean Stein wrote Edie (1982). That book became an international best-seller, of which Norman Mailer wrote: ‘This is the book of the Sixties that we have been waiting for.’

portrait photo of Jean Stein

George Plimpton

George Plimpton (1927-2003) was the bestselling author and editor of nearly thirty books, as well as the cofounder, publisher, and editor of the Paris Review. He wrote regularly for such magazines as Sports Illustrated and Esquire, and he appeared numerous times in films and on television.

Praise for Edie

Edie Sedgwick was the spirit of the Sixties, and these pages capture her power to dazzle us. I have read no social history to compare with it. While it is not a novel (although it reads like one) I still will say: This is the book of the Sixties that we have been waiting for

Norman Mailer

Jean Stein and George Plimpton have made such a good job of it that the effect is of a novel illuminating a wide spectrum of Americana

George Melly, New Society

Like all American stories, Edie's is about being born in paradise and then being ejected from it... in spite of the wealth and fame and catastrophe which seem to make it singular, it is everyone's

Peter Conrad, Observer

Addictive

London Review of Books

Extraordinary... a fascinating narrative that is both meticulously reported and expertly orchestrated

The New York Times

Edie is always an inspiration. The cautionary destructive tale of Edie Sedgwick, Warhol muse and factory beauty, compellingly told by those who were there

Simon Garfield, The Week

Through a kaleidoscope of seemingly fragmented voices, patterns form, giving brilliant definition to the very American tragedy of Edie Sedgwick, a woman...not likely to be forgotten after this haunting portrait

Publishers Weekly

An exceptionally seductive biography... You can't put it down... It has novelistic excitement

Los Angeles Times Book Review

There is no more classic summertime read

New York Magazine

Jean Stein invented a form that many have tried to replicate since: the oral history biography. The voices in these pages give a sentimental education that is glamorous, dark, sexy, depraved, comical, and profound. Edie maps the follies and glories of an entire era—the Warhol 1960s.

Rachel Kushner