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Advance praise for American Rose…
Sad, smart, brassy… the true story of the Queen of Burlesque is even weirder and wilder than the legend.
—Laura Miller, Salon.com
The best biographies do more than detail the life of a subject—they completely embed the reader in that person’s life and mindset. They combine tenacious reporting with writing that belongs to a first-rate novelist. American Rose is the rare biography that captures the imagination and doesn’t let go. It would scare the bejeesus out of Gypsy Rose Lee, and it’s guaranteed to enthrall readers.
—BookPage
Karen Abbott unfolds Gypsy’s life story as a microcosm of 20th-century America, with a backdrop of Prohibition, the Depression, and both World Wars… enormously entertaining. The book, like its subject, is pretty sensational stuff.
—Bust magazine
As chronicled in Karen Abbott’s rowdy new biography, Gypsy Rose Lee turned stripping into high art—and captured America’s imagination…
— Vogue magazine
Click here for the full Vogue article about American Rose and Gypsy
Imaginative and engaging… Abbott shares some fresh, intimate details as she develops two parallel narrative strands: the hand-to-mouth early years when Rose was plying the city-to-city vaudeville circuit with her child acts featuring her talented daughter, June, and the more gawky, reliable Louise; and the steady success of the Minsky brothers on the Lower East Side of New York City as they invested in a string of vaudeville theaters that gradually morphed into wildly successful burlesque houses. When June ran away (at age 13 to get married), Rose reinvented Louise as her last vestige of hope–and thus Gypsy Rose Lee made “her delicate, unclean break from the past.” Abbott’s work, cutting fluidly between decades and recreating dialogue, captures this dizzying, sullying, transformative era in America.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Abbott writes in a propulsive, witty style, jumping back and forth in chronology and limning a vivid portrait of Gypsy Rose Lee’s milieu, lovingly rendering the Tammany Hall politicians, gangsters, Algonquin Round Table habitués and theatrical promoters that constituted Lee’s world. Running concurrently with Lee’s story is that of the Minsky brothers, whose burlesque house became a New York institution and served as the setting for the introduction of Gypsy Rose Lee, the teasing, intellectual beauty with the razor-sharp instinct for what to reveal and what to hide. Lee’s success—she would publish novels, act in films and write an autobiography that would serve as inspiration for one of Broadway’s most enduring triumphs—was sweet, but Mama Rose, long after her death, would haunt her daring daughter to the grave. A fast-paced, funny, flavorful reckoning with a unique American icon.
— Kirkus Reviews
With staggeringly in-depth research—and never before uncovered details about Gypsy Rose Lee’s life—Karen Abbott composes a story wrought with personal drama and insight into a dark era in American history. All the while, she never betrays Gypsy’s bawdy, whip-smart edge. (One chapter opens with a quote from controversial director Otto Preminger: “I only fucked Gypsy Rose Lee once.”) The story is as beguiling as it is surprisingly timeless. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said to Gypsy: “May your bare ass always be shining.”
—Elle magazine
“Gypsy Rose Lee — Vaudevillian, stripper, writer, public figure, provocateur — lived a life that seemed utterly open and free. America thought they knew this complicated woman, whose story was told again and again on stage, screen, and page. But as Karen Abbott shows in her wonderful new book, Gypsy Rose was an intensely hidden, damaged, and brilliant star who almost no one really knew. American Rose is a fitting tribute to an amazing woman, telling her story beautifully while revealing as much about post-Depression America as it does about celebrity life. It’s cultural history at its best.”
—Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“American Rose is history the way it ought to be written. Karen Abbott gets under the skin of a woman who made a lifelong study of two fine arts: old school burlesque (the real burlesque, that is), and never, ever revealing one inch more of yourself than you absolutely have to. Like her subject, Abbott leaves her audience wanting more. Unlike Gypsy, though, she’s more than just a tease. American Rose strips its subject to the bone.”
—Mike Dash, bestselling author of Satan’s Circus and The First Family
“The story of Gypsy Rose Lee is the story of America itself: tumultuous, daring, devastating, thrilling, and relentlessly self-inventing. I was fascinated by Gypsy’s unusual power—over men, over women, over anything with breath in its body—and how creative she had to be, in 1935, to sell sexy without actually selling sex. Karen Abbott combines meticulous research with narrative drive to create a gripping page-turner that belongs on the shelves of history buffs and fiction fans alike.”
—Kathryn Stockett, bestselling author of The Help
“American Rose is Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton, a haunting, harrowing, and ultimately triumphant tale of an enduring icon. With blade-sharp writing and scrupulous research, Karen Abbott masterfully unveils the secrets of Gypsy Rose Lee, whose chameleon-like ability to recreate herself perfectly embodied the spirit of the time and country that made her. You’ll be transported to the back rooms of seedy speakeasies, to the brightest stretches of Broadway, and, most vividly, to the heart of what makes us survive—at any cost.”
—Sara Gruen, bestselling author of Ape House
“In American Rose, Karen Abbott takes a fascinating time in America’s life and wraps it around the naked body of the woman who epitomized it. She’s a meticulous researcher who knows how to weave the threads of history into a page-turner than reads like the best fiction. I’ve become an evangelist for this book; do not miss it.”
— Joshilyn Jackson, bestselling author of gods in Alabama and Backseat Saints.
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