Living Room

Sol Stein

Oct 2013 · Untreed Reads

About this ebook

Originally published in 1974, this landmark novel is available in ebook format for the first time. Shirley Hartman, at twenty-eight, was the star of Madison Avenue, a woman who'd made it to the top in the male-dominated advertising game. Beauty, brains, fame, love...yet there she was, standing on a lonely rooftop, contemplating suicide. Had Shirley pushed too hard and reached too far-or can this extraordinary woman break out to some living room beyond career success and the usual arrangements with a man? "Shirley Hartman is as much a feminist as Portia, Becky Sharp or Scarlett O'Hara. In her, Stein has created a heroine yearning for that living space that men and women need after social and financial triumph. The kind of novel one keeps on ready." -New Republic "A roller coaster reader ride. Shirley Hartman is a ball of fire you are not likely to forget." -John Barkham Reviews

About the author

Sol Stein is a Chicago-born transplant to the Bronx. In the 1950's he was an anti-Communist scriptwriter for the Voice of America, Washington¿s Cold War propaganda radio network, and a leading defender of civil liberties. But he made his lasting mark in publishing. In 1962 he and his wife at the time, Patricia Day, founded the publishing house Stein and Day, which had immediate success that year with the director Elia Kazan¿s debut book, America, America. The story of a Greek youth who comes to the United States, the book sold three million copies, and Mr. Kazan turned it into a movie, released the next year. Mr. Stein was Stein and Day¿s editor in chief. In one of the many books Mr. Stein himself wrote, Bankruptcy: A Feast for Lawyers (1989), he exposed the bureaucratic nightmare that had accompanied the financial implosion of Stein and Day after 27 years in business. Solomon Stein was born in Chicago on Oct. 13, 1926, to Louis and Zelda (Zam) Stein, Jewish immigrants who fled Russia. His mother became a translator for the United Nations. His father was a jewelry designer. The family moved to the North Bronx in 1930. Mr. Stein went on to enroll at City College, but his studies there were interrupted when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces in 1944. He voluntarily transferred to the infantry and served in Germany during the post-World War II occupation. After returning from military service, he completed his bachelor of social science degree and earned a master¿s in English and comparative literature at Columbia. Besides working as an anti-Communist scriptwriter for the Voice of America, Mr. Stein was a member of its ideological advisory staff starting in the early 1950s. The journalist Robert Scheer, who was editor of the left-leaning Ramparts magazine in the late 1960s, branded him The Archdeacon of the Cold War. Sol Sttein passed away on September 26, 2019 at the age of 92.