Ethan Mordden

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Ethan Mordden (born January 27, 1949 , Pennsylvania ) is an American writer .

Life

Mordden grew up in Pennsylvania, Venice, and Long Island . He received his education at the Friends Academy in Locust Valley, New York State and at the University of Pennsylvania. He tried a career in show business first, working as a musical director at off-Brodway theaters and in the provinces. He registered for the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, which was led by Lehman Engel. The workshop is a facility for further training of musical composers and librettists. Mordden worked in the following years both as a composer and as a librettist and wrote musicals, e.g. B. Shakespeare's Measure for Measure or Max Beerbohms Zuleika Dobson as a template. Later, however, he only wrote prose.

Works

His short stories, novels and non-fiction books cover a wide range of topics such as the American musical, opera, film and, especially in the fictional works, the emergence and development of the American gay scene, especially in New York. He has written fictional texts for The New Yorker magazine , but also reviews in the Critic at Large section on Cole Porter , Judy Garland and the musical Show Boat , as well as reviews of a biography about the Barrymore family and Art Spiegelman's character story Maus - The story of a survivor .

His best-known stories form the Buddies cycle . These appeared in book form from 1985, beginning with the volume I've a Feeling We're not in Kansas Anymore . The fifth volume, which appeared in 2005 and was entitled "How's Your Romance?", Has the subtitle "Concluding the" Buddies "Cycle". Overall, the stories form a chronicle of the ups and downs, love relationships and losses of men who form a loose group, of artists who, however, never treat each other in a hurtful way. With this, Mordden deviates from the pattern that was given by Mart Crowley with his play The Boys in the Band for the description of behavior in the gay scene. In Crowley's play, supposedly best friends are constantly attacking each other in a way that has since cast a crooked light on the gay art scene, a pattern that e.g. B. was also followed in the television series Queer as Folk . In murders, men like themselves and others, that is his ideal of gay friendship. Another unique feature of gay literature is that men respect each other's privacy. This “family” is a place of safety, which explains why the friends are so closely related.

In 1995 Mordden wrote the novel How Long Has This Been Going On? . It describes the life of a group of men and women from 1949 to 1991. With one exception, they are all gay or lesbian. Mordden himself appreciated the most of his books The Venice Adriana from 1998. Using the example of the life and artistic development of the opera singer Maria Callas , we examine whether we are prisoners of our fate or whether we can freely choose it. In a play à la Nabokov for opera lovers, the plot and characters reflect the opera Adriana Lecouvreur by Francesco Cilea . Mordden's last work to gain some fame is A Bad Man Is Easy To Find , which he published in 1989 under the pseudonym MJ Verlaine. Although its structure of intertwined narratives is similar to the Buddies cycle, it is only about women, only one gay man. In 2008 Mordden published the surrealist novel The Jewcatcher . The novel is set in Berlin and covers the period from the end of the Weimar Republic to the end of the war. The many main characters are a combination of Mordden's own inventions and people such as Adolf Hitler, Marlene Dietrich, Raoul Wallenberg, Claus von Stauffenberg and President von Hindenburg.

Mordden's non-fictional work includes seven books, including a history of Broadway musical from the 1920s to the 1990s, orchestral guides and opera recording guides, a cultural history of the United States of the 1920s, essays on the opera diva phenomenon and the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein . He has written a number of books on film, including the influence of major Hollywood studios and the role of female movie stars. In his non-fiction books, Mordden has contributed his personal expertise and personal experiences.

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personal data
SURNAME Mordden, Ethan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Verlaine, MJ (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 27, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Pennsylvania , United States