How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV

“How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV begins to fill a gap in understanding the intersections of mass media, public discourse, and American sexual politics.” - Jamie Landau, Rhetoric & Public Affairs

“Frank is to be commended for going against the grain of so many analysts of the role of intellectuals in American public life who, for whatever reason, have chosen to ignore for several decades, one of the most outstanding voices of critical intellectual practice in the history of the United States.” - David Brian Howard, TOPIA

“Ultimately, for mass communication historians, Frank’s book primarily is a specific wake-up call about the possibilities of studying novelists as news sources of many times and even as newsworthy figures, and a general wake-up call about the lack of research (at least in the United States because Europe is far ahead here) on journalism, other mass media, and intellectuals (‘public’ or not).” - Dane S. Claussen, Journalism History

"The subject of Frank’s book is full of interest. . . ." - Mark Heffernan, Montreal Review of Books

“How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV is an illuminating, wide-ranging, and provocative examination of Gore Vidal’s mulitple public identities—novelist, screenwriter, political commentator, TV personality. Marcie Frank’s insights into Vidal’s unique career and the cultural context in which it unfolded will appeal to anyone with an interest in American popular and literary cultures and the places where the two intersect.” - Tom Perrotta, author of the novels Little Children, Joe College, and Election

“While other literary-minded writers of his generation (Updike, Bellow, Baldwin, Roth) barricaded themselves in bookchat, Gore Vidal took the full plunge into the new media age. There is no comparable figure to suture the two worlds, or two epochs.” - Michael Warner, author of Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life

“With her pithy deadpan and unresting curiosity, Marcie Frank is a wonderful interlocutor for Vidal. Fusing a startling range of recent histories, her short book is full of satisfying double-takes and provocations.” - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity