Category: Book Reviews

Alexander Eliot Featured In New Art Reminiscence

Author Alexander Eliot is featured in a new book, Pieces of Glass: An Artoire, by award-winning Hollywood screenwriter & author, John Sacret Young. Mr. Young devotes an entire chapter, A Rainy Night, to a chance encounter with Alex. Their talk is mostly about artists Alex met over the years during his tenure as Art Editor of Time magazine and later, in particular, artist  Charles Burchfield.

“I took delight in American painting.” Alexander Eliot told me. “And it amazed me nobody cared. Art was very low on the totem pole in America. When Harry Truman jeered at ‘ham-and-egg art’, millions cheered and senators looked under the bed and saw Communists in what these artists were doing. I felt I had a mission to put American art on the map.”

A mission certainly made more difficult due to the political leanings of Time owner, Henry Luce.

Purchase Pieces of Glass: An Artoire.

Review of Sight and Insight by Salvador Dali

dali

Almost demoniacally, Freud penetrates a work of art. Malraux mingles it with his own anguish. Between these poles of promiscuity, Eliot’s moral attitude is original: Chastity; he loves art without violating her, he is intimate without so much as a touch. And just as Gala is in all my work, Eliot’s partner lives in his.
-Salvador Dali

Book Review – Earth, Air, Fire and Water

Anyone who dares to delve into the condition of 20th century American life is most probably doing it to earn a doctorate. Not so author Alexander Eliot, 43, an out-of-place, out-of-sorts, self-styled recluse who, on the pine-clad slopes of Mount Pentelikon, near Athens, pondered the question, put down his answer in the dozen meditations of this new book.

Book Review of Earth Air Fire and Water in Time Magazine, December 4, 1962:

Earth Air Fire Water
Anyone who dares to delve into the condition of 20th century American life is most probably doing it to earn a doctorate. Not so author Alexander Eliot, 43, an out-of-place, out-of-sorts, self-styled recluse who, on the pine-clad slopes of Mount Pentelikon, near Athens, pondered the question, put down his answer in the dozen meditations of this new book. Continue reading “Book Review – Earth, Air, Fire and Water”

Eliot’s Books

Timeless Myths (front cover)
Most famous for his books on myths:
The Universal Myths: Heroes, Gods, Tricksters, and Others (New American Library, 1990)
Introduced by Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade
The Timeless Myths: How Ancient Legends Influence the Modern World, New York: Truman Talley Books/Meridian, 1997
The Global Myths: Exploring Primitive, Pagan, Sacred, and Scientific
Mythologies (New York: Continuum, 1993)
Myths (New York : McGraw-Hill International, 1976) (published in 5 languages) Continue reading “Eliot’s Books”

Love Play

Love Play (New York: NAL, 1966)

“A big, fat, lewd, philosophic work of fiction, pure and impure; a free-for-all, with Rabelais as a referee.” Thus Alexander Eliot describes Love Play, a work of dazzling verbal pyrotechnics, razor-keen wit, and outrageously hilarious (and to some readers, no doubt, simply outrageous) sexual high jinks.

Love Play is the title of this novel in play form and the spirit of play animates its pages: the soaring lyric play of delightfully divergent ideas, and the ribald, earthy play of the bodily passions. Leading the list of players is the books wondrous heroine, Ellen Freeman, a girl of high ideals and fervent desires, with a golden voice and a golden body, equally generous with both. Ellen is a Lolita past the age of consent, a Candy sans illusions: she is an all-American fantasy come true.

For these and other vivid characters, both male and female, young, middle-aged and old, the author has created a magnificently entertaining divertissement. Scintillating, shocking, wildly funny by turns, Love Play is the most original book of the year.