Sam Kashner (b. 1954) writes about film and culture for Vanity Fair, where he’s a contributing editor who’s written several cover stories for the magazine, including articles on Marilyn Monroe, William Manchester’s controversial Death of a President (about the JFK assassination), and an interview with Julia Roberts and Mike Nichols.
He’s the author of the 1999 novel Sinatraland, which was named a Los Angeles Times and a Washington Post “Notable Book of the Year,” and the 2004 memoir When I Was Cool, My Life at the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, about the two years he spent as Allen Ginsburg’s first poetry student at the Jack Kerouac School of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s.
Kashner is also the author of three books of poetry, beginning with Driving at Night, published by Hanging Loose Press; No More Mr. Nice Guy, with illustrations by the celebrated English cartoonist Glen Baxter; and, most recently, Don Quixote in America.
With his spouse and co-author Nancy Schoenberger, he wrote Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century, a New York Times bestseller in 2010 that was excerpted in Vanity Fair. They also co-authored Hollywood Kryptonite: the Bulldog, the Lady, and the Death of Superman, a major source for the 2007 Focus Feature film Hollywoodland. Another collaboration, A Talent for Genius, the Life and Times of Oscar Levant, was published in 1994 and was optioned by Ben Stiller at Red Hour Films.
From loose pages to issue 119 of our magazine, an anthology of over 100 HLP poets, over a decade of the Loose Award for translated works, the Founders prize for first book in its third year, and a bunch of great books in the works, we couldn’t have come this far without you.