Currently Promoting: Souls For Sale

About the book:

First published 1922 and adapted to screen the following year by Rupert Hughes himself, this “insider” story of Hollywood filmmaking traces every Hollywood trope from slapstick comedy to theatrical melodrama with love and deceit at every page turn. Hazing the lines between truth and fiction, Souls for Sale is a snapshot of Hollywood’s Golden Age, hailed by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sandburg as “the heart of moviedom by anyone who believes it.”

Praise for Souls for Sale

“Hugely successful in its day, Souls for Sale furnishes a fascinating window on early Hollywood.”
–Shelley Stamp, author of Lois Weber in Early Hollywood and Movie-Struck Girls

“With shades of Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, Hail, Caeser!, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Souls for Sale feels like a kindred script waiting for an update in our time, where truth and lies have taken on new significance.”
–Marsha Gordon, Professor of Film Studies, North Carolina State University

“Souls for Sale heralds the birth of the New Woman, while also providing an insider’s take on ‘the birth of an immortal art,’ which is to say, cinema.”
–Mark Eaton, author of What Price Hollywood? Modern American Writers and the Movies and Religion and American Literature Since 1950 (Bloomsbury 2020)

About the authors:

Rupert Hughes was an American novelist, film director, Oscar- nominated screenwriter, military officer, and music composer.

Sarah Gleeson-White is Associate Professor in American Literature at the University of Sydney.