When H. L. Mencken talked, everyone listened -- like it or not. In the Roaring Twenties, he was the one critic who mattered, the champion of a generation of plain-speaking writers who redefined the American novel, and the ax-swinging scourge of the know-nothing, go-getting middle-class philistines w[...]

Louis Armstrong is widely known as the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century. He was a phenomenally gifted and imaginative artist, and an entertainer so irresistibly magnetic that he knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts four decades after he cut his first record. Offstage he was w[...]

A major new biography of Duke Ellington from the acclaimed author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong"
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was the greatest jazz composer of the twentieth century--and an impenetrably enigmatic personality whom no one, not even his closest friends, claimed to underst[...]