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Walter, Eugene, 1874-1941We have 2 books for this author.
 Eugene Walter, 1921-March 29, 1998, was an American screenwriter, poet, short-story author, actor, puppeteer, gourmet chef, cryptographer, translator, editor, costume designer and well-known raconteur. A friend once observed that Walter had lived a "pixilated wonderland of a life." BiographyWalter was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, which he described as "a separate kingdom. We are not North America; we are North Haiti." Walter and Truman Capote became acquainted in Mobile as children, a time when Capote was known as Bulldog Persons. Walter was labeled "Mobile's Renaissance Man" because of his diverse activities in many areas of the arts. In later life, he maintained a connection with Mobile by carrying a shoebox of Alabama red clay around Europe. During World War II, Walter spent three years in Alaska as an Army cryptographer. A resident of Greenwich Village during the post-WWII years, he pioneered an early form of happening by staging a spontaneous and unannounced group performance in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. He relocated in the 1950s to Paris, where he helped launch the Paris Review, contributing to the publication's earliest issues with text, art and interviews. His short story "Troubador" appeared in the first issue. His Paris Review interviews included Isak Dinesen [1] and Robert Penn Warren. [2] In 1960, for Transatlantic Review, he interviewed Gore Vidal. [3] FilmsLiving in Rome during the 1960s and 1970s, Walter was a translator for Federico Fellini. For different film companies, he translated hundreds of scripts. He appeared as an actor in more than 20 feature films, notably as the American journalist in Fellini's 8½ (1963). For Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits (1965), he played the role of the Mother Superior and collaborated with Nino Rota on the song, "Go Milk the Moon" (cut from the final version of the film). Rota and Walter teamed again for the song "What Is a Youth" for Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968). BooksHis books include Monkey Poems (1953), The Byzantine Riddle (1980) and The Untidy Pilgrim (1954), a novel recently reprinted by the University of Alabama Press. He also compiled several cookbooks: Delectable Dishes From Termite Hall (1982) and the bestselling American Cooking: Southern Style, part of Time-Life's Foods of the World series. Hints & Pinches (1991) is an encyclopedic coverage of more than 150 herbs, spices, chutneys and relishes. He contributed to numerous magazines, including Food Arts, Gourmet, Old Mobile and Harper's Bazaar. His essay "Front Porches" is an evocative portrait of Mobile in 1929:
His literary awards include a Rockefeller-Sewanee Fellowship, an O. Henry citation, the Lippincott Award for fiction and the Prix Guilloux. He returned to Mobile in 1979 and died there of liver cancer in 1998. Katherine Clark began interviewing Walter in 1991 for an oral biography, and Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet was published by Crown on August 21, 2001, three years after Walter's death. Shelved in bookstores during the three weeks prior to 9/11, the book has a paragraph describing reactions to the performance art he staged in the 1940s at the Museum of Modern Art. Yet Walter's words were suddenly synchronistic and eerily prophetic: "You could tell he was the guy who sees a train wreck, or a skyscraper collapse, and he's never got his camera when he needs it." Jonathan Yardley reviewed Milking the Moon in The Washington Post:
Eugene Walter: Last of the Bohemians is a documentary in production by Waterfront Pictures. ReferenceListen to
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This biographical information was gathered from the Eugene_Walter page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project. BooksThe Easiest Way Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911The Easiest Way A Story of Metropolitan Life |
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