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Martin Duberman describes himself as having "the double vision of the outsider who is let inside . . . a spy in the culture." Fortunately for the rest of us, he's decided to tell what he learned through his spying. This wonderful mixture of diary and retrospective commentary puts some of the important intellectual, cultural, and political movements of the 1980s and 1990s in sharp relief. Waiting to Land is an absorbing and pleasurable read. --John D'Emilio, author of Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin Martin Duberman was an astute participant in the LBGT movement that transformed American life in the past half-century. This book, drawn from his diaries and letters from 1985 to 2008, gives us a vivid, present-time portrait of the later years of that movement, bringing to life its aspirations and its daring, and also showing us how the movement changed as it interacted with the politics of our larger society.
--Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor, The Graduate Center, CUNY Although best known for his acclaimed biographies, historian Martin Duberman is also a renowned memoirist who has plumbed his own life for truths that have meaning for us all. In the bestselling Cures, he carried his story up to 1970, focusing on his fear that homosexuality was pathological and on his desperate search for a therapeutic cure. Duberman's second autobiographical book, Midlife Queer, centered on the 1970s, by which time he'd thrown off his earlier doubts and become fully engaged in the worlds of gay politics and culture. Waiting to Land takes Duberman's story up to the present day. As his public engagement deepens, Duberman finds himself increasingly at odds with the mounting assimilationism of the mainstream gay movement--and with the left itself, which Duberman has come to believe is smugly oblivious to the realities of gay life. Disaffection leads him to till crucial new ground, including the founding of the groundbreaking Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) and serving as an original board member of Queers for Economic Justice. Interweaving diary entries with letters and with reflections written in 2008, Waiting to Land incisively probes issues of crucial import for everyone. By turns moving, funny, provocative, and profound, this book is an unflinchingly honest and deeply important window into an extraordinary life....
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Passionate, enormously talented, and, at times, seemingly larger than life, Paul Robeson lived one of the great lives of the twentieth century. Martin Duberman's classic biography, reissued by The New Press, offers a monumental and powerfully affecting portrait of one of this century's most notable performers, political radicals, and champions of racial equality. ...
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Lincoln Kirstein was a tireless champion of the arts in America. Working behind the scenes to provide artists with money, space, audiences, and, at times, emotional support, he helped found such landmark cultural institutions as the New York City Ballet, the School of American Ballet, New York’s Lincoln Center and Stratford's American Shakespeare Festival. Duberman's biography sheds light on this lamentably neglected cultural figure. Though best known as a benefactor of the arts, Kirstein was also an adept critic, poet and novelist who published some fifteen books in his lifetime. From his undergraduate years at Harvard, where he established the influential literary magazine Hound and Horn, as well as the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art (precursor to the Modern Museum of Art), to his complex and historically significant relationship with George Balanchine, Kirstein's contributions were indespensible to the development of the arts in America. Authoritative and elegant, Duberman's biography utilizes previously unavailable documents, including Kirstein's diaries, to reveal the keen eye, incessant self-doubt, and enormous ambition that drove Kirstein's relentless advocacy. The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein brings attention to an important, but until-now unappreciated figure whose individual contribution to the arts was one of the greatest of the twentieth century. ...
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With faculty and alumni that included John Cage, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olson, Josef and Anni Albers, Paul Goodman, and Robert Rauschenberg, Black Mountain College ranked among the most important artistic and intellectual communities of the twentieth century. In his groundbreaking history, Martin Duberman uses interviews, anecdotes, and research to depict the relationships that made Black Mountain College what it was. "Black Mountain" documents the college's twenty-three-year tenure, from its most brilliant moments of self-reinvention to its lowest moments of petty infighting. It records the financial difficulties that beleaguered the community throughout its existence and the determination it took to keep the college in operation. Duberman creates a nuanced portrait of this community so essential to the development of American arts and counterculture....
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Four inspiring, bold political plays that bring history alive as theater, from the Bancroft Prize-winning historian, cultural critic, and public intellectual.
BR>"Martin Duberman occupies a singularly important place in American culture."—Catharine R. Stimpson, Dean and University Professor, NYU
Best known for his acclaimed biographies of Paul Robeson and Lincoln Kirstein and his provocative books about the gay rights movement, Martin Duberman has also had a long-standing involvement with the theater that began early in his career, when his drama criticism appeared in the Partisan Review and Harper's
This volume includes four plays: In White America, about the black struggle for freedom and human rights, which became a smash hit and was named the 1963 Best Off-Broadway production of the year; Mother Earth, which brings to vivid life Emma Goldman, one of the twentieth century's most famous revolutionaries; Posing Naked, the heartbreaking story of Smith College professor Newton Arvin, the most prominent (closeted) gay literary critic of his day; and Visions of Kerouac, which captures the beat era—from Kerouac's ambition-filled early years, crisscrossing the country with pals like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, to the later years of isolation and alcoholism. This paperback edition makes these four politically charged plays available to a new generation....
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