He arrived in America with little more than ambition and a gift for dreaming bigger than anyone around him dared. Samuel Goldwyn — born Schmuel Gelbfisz in the tenements of Warsaw — would go on to reshape the very face of Hollywood, building an empire of glamour, scandal, and unforgettable cinema through sheer force of will. Alva Johnston's The Great Goldwyn, published in 1937 at the height of the golden age of film, pulls back the velvet curtain on one of the most colorful, contradictory,...

The real-life adventures of Addison and Wilson Mizner, the subjects of the Stephen Sondheim musical Gold!Alva Johnston's joint biography of Addison and Wilson Mizner is a delightful portrait of two of the early twentieth century's most clever and infamous rascals. Born in the 1870s in California, the brothers quickly rose to prominence during the various booms of the 1920s.Addison, the elder, was a self-made architect and real-estate dealer who desig...