About the Book

Book Synopsis

The first major biography of one of Old Hollywood's greatest directors.

Sometime partner of the eccentric Howard Hughes, drinking buddy of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, an inveterate gambler and a notorious liar, Howard Hawks was the most modern of the great masters and one of the first directors to declare his independence from the major studios. He played Svengali to Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift, and others, but Hawks's greatest creation may have been himself. As The Atlantic Monthly noted, "Todd McCarthy. . . . has gone further than anyone else in sorting out the truths and lies of the life, the skills and the insight and the self-deceptions of the work."

"A fluent biography of the great director, a frequently rotten guy but one whose artistic independence and standards of film morality never failed." -The New York Times Book Review

"Hawks's life, until now rather an enigma, has been put into focus and made one with his art in Todd McCarthy's wise and funny Howard Hawks." --The Wall Street Journal

"Excellent. . . . A respectful, exhaustive, and appropriately smartass look at Hollywood's most versatile director." --Newsweek

Review Quotes

"Spectacular . . . McCarthy's thick, rich biography . . . chronicles in vivid detail how perhaps the last great popular artist in the movies worked."-Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A fluent biography of the great director, a frequently rotten guy but one whose artistic independence and standards of film morality never failed."--The New York Times Book Review

"Hawks's life, until now rather an enigma, has been put into focus and made one with his art in Todd McCarthy's wise and funny Howard Hawks."--The Wall Street Journal

"Excellent . . . a respectful, exhaustive, and appropriately smartass look at Hollywood's most versatile director."--Newsweek

"McCarthy does a good job of distilling not so much a style as an unflinching philosophy of life. . . . He gives us the stoic, comic essence of Hawks and his films."--Entertainment Weekly

"McCarthy shrewdly identifies the peculiar kind of auteur Hawks was. . . . McCarthy does an excellent job of evoking the backgrounds to Hawks's life. . . . McCarthy gives lucid and balanced accounts of all the films too . . . and only occasionally loses patience with Hawks's boasting."--The New York Review of Books

"There had always been a mystique around Hawks the man . . . a WASP Monroe Stahr, Fitzgerald's Last Tycoon. Todd McCarthy . . . quietly dismantles much of this picture. . . . In area after area Hawks, skilled at inflating his achievements, made himself his most carefully constructed artifact. . . . As McCarthy breaks through Hawks's protective shell of misrepresentations, this golden figure takes on a poignant quality-all that effort to be what he was not."--The Atlantic Monthly

"Todd McCarthy has been engaged in this, the first biography of Howard Hawks, a long time. Every Hawksian is in his debt: There is never going to be a fuller record of the external life and work of Howard Winchester Hawks. . . . We see and feel the director on set, rewriting as he goes, coaxing his actors to extend and improvise, building scenes and fun-and keeping it all in balance. . . . As a working portrait of a great director and contriver, this book is beyond compare. Time and again, the detail adds to our pleasure with the films."--L.A. Weekly Literary Supplement

"McCarthy . . . provides Hawks with the major biography he deserves, exhaustively researched, judiciously written and full of wonderful stories. . . . Informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of film history, by respect for the films and by compassion for a difficult man, McCarthy has created a biography that will be essential for anyone interested in the history of the movies."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood] . . . does not shy away from Hawks's lying or vanity, but it is appreciative of his large talent."--The Antioch Review

"[McCarthy] doesn't hold back, in content or enthusiasm. . . . The beauty of his writing often lies in his ability to side with Hawks's detractors . . . yet still make a case for Hawks as a key figure in American cinema. . . . A valuable book."--Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

"Todd McCarthy's hefty, detail-filled biography of the genre-hopping director does a great job separating fact from myth."--Boston Sunday Herald

"A thorough and thoroughly readable biography."--Los Angeles Times

"Intelligent . . . illuminating."--The Boston Phoenix Literary Section

"McCarthy focuses with great and admirable detail on Ha

About the Author

Todd McCarthy, the author of Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox, is Variety's chief film critic and coeditor of the classic anthology King of the B's: Working Within the Hollywood System. He also wrote and codirected the award-winning Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography and won an Emmy Award for writing the documentary Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.