The most famous man you’ve never heard of.
As the highest-paid and most-read reporter of his era, Odd McIntyre achieved great fame and fortune in the early decades of the twentieth century. In his daily column about New York, he recorded what was happening backstage and behind the scenes with popular culture in the city and around the world.
He was close friends with many of the leading personalities of the day, including writers Edna Ferber, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; entertainers Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., Billie Burke, and Will Rogers; composers George Gershwin and Meredith Willson; actors Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin, and many others.
Most of my newspaper days have been consecrated to the study of those fortunates in the passing promenade who have obtained that nebulous quality called celebrity. From the sidelines I have watched the real and the fakes.
O. O. McIntyre
With the help of his wife, Maybelle, Odd triumphed over a debilitating mental illness and years of professional failure to become the nation’s preeminent pop culture writer. He was there as the telegraph changed the news business, and then as radio changed everything. He covered live entertainment as it shifted from vaudeville to something new and exciting on Broadway, and had a literal front-row seat as moving pictures evolved from nickelodeons, to silent films, and finally to talkies.
Buried under a century of change, what Odd wrote about entertainment, media, and politics nearly one hundred years ago provides a unique glimpse into one of the most fascinating periods in American popular culture.
An Odd Book will be available April 1, 2017 on Amazon.com and where books are sold.
Oddly Social:
