About this Blog

"In the future everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes." So said the bleached-out, late lamented artist Andy Warhol. Having lived and worked in New York City, Warhol came to fully grasp the hold celebrity has on us. In this very famous sentence, he meant to point out that in a culture fixated on fame, many people will suddenly flash brightly onto the public screen, then--poof--will just as quickly disappear from public view--like shooting stars. Other individuals derive their celebrity from one stellar accomplishment (one hit song, one iconic role, etc.) that they never again match.

This blog is devoted to the one part of our celebrity culture that no one has written much about: temporary/one-shot celebrities.

The pace of modern life has quickened, and now we hear people speaking of someone's 15 seconds of fame. These "celebrities with a lower-case c" who will appear in this blog sometimes come to us from the world of entertainment, sometimes from the world of news. All are fascinating.

The need of our communications media for a continual stream of new material assures that we will have no end of colorful people who go quickly, where celebrity is concerned, from zero to hero (or villain) and back to zero. Now you see 'em, now you don't. What a crazy world, eh?

Temporary celebrities coming from the world of entertainment include one-hit recording artists; TV and movie icons who, although they might have had a great many accomplishments in their career, are remembered for one big role; standouts of reality TV; sports figures remembered for one remarkable accomplishment; and people whose celebrity came from one big role in a commercial or print ad.

News-based temporary celebrities come in many forms: mass/serial killers, other murderers of special note, sex-crime offenders, disgraced figures of government/military/business/media/religion, spies/traitors, hoaxers, femmes/hommes fatale, heroes, whistle blowers, inventors/innovators, and victims.

Celebrity Blogsburg will consider each category in turn.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Misc.: Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee from Monroeville, Alabama, is one of America's best known one-shot novelists. Her masterwork is To Kill a Mockingbird, which took the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.

Her famous novel was originally done as a series of short stories, but her publisher, Lippincott, encouraged her to rewrite her material as a novel. The book appeared in 1960.

Lee, who had studied at Oxford and had worked as an airline clerk, had the help of Lippincott editor Tay Hohoff as well as that of her childhood pal writer Truman Capote. Lee had worked as Capote's' assistant while he worked on his own famous book, In Cold Blood.

Lee has maintained a very private life since her initial acclaim and became a good friend of actor Gregory Peck, who so perfectly played the part of lawyer Atticus Finch in the film based on her novel. Book and movie dealt masterfully with life as lived in the segregated South where Lee grew up, and it encouraged people to consider the enormous injustices of racial discrimination.

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