Yale University Press imprint: 1958 books

A lively and inspired biography celebrating the centennial of this master choreographer, dancer, and stage director Jerome Robbins (1918–1998) was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz and grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey, where his Russian-Jewish immigrant parents owned the Comfort Corset Company....

Kay Swift (1897–1993) was one of the few women composers active on Broadway in the first half of the twentieth century. Best known as George Gershwin’s assistant, musical adviser, and intimate friend, Swift was in fact an accomplished musician herself, a pianist and composer whose Fine and Dandy (1930)...

Television and TV viewing are not what they once were—and that’s a good thing, according to award-winning author and critic Clive James. Since serving as television columnist for the London Observer from 1972 to 1982, James has witnessed a radical change in content, format, and programming, and in...

The history of American dance reflects the nation’s tangled culture. Dancers from wildly different backgrounds learned, imitated, and stole from one another.  Audiences everywhere embraced the result as deeply American.   Using the stories of tapper Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ginger Rogers and Fred...

Caesar Augustus’ story, one of the most riveting in western history, is filled with drama and contradiction, risky gambles and unexpected success. He began as a teenage warlord, whose only claim to power was as the heir of the murdered Julius Caesar. Mark Antony dubbed him “a boy who owes everything...

Arnold Schoenberg’s close involvement with many of the principal developments of twentieth-century music, most importantly the break with tonality and the creation of twelve-tone composition, generated controversy from the time of his earliest works to the present day. This authoritative new collection...

From colonial times to the present, American composers have lived on the fringes of society and defined themselves in large part as outsiders. In this stimulating book Michael Broyles considers the tradition of maverick composers and explores what these mavericks reveal about American attitudes toward...

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Western choice”-his exile to the West after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-allowed him to take a crucial literary journey, leaving the closed nineteenth-century Russian culture behind and arriving in the extreme openness of twentieth-century America. In Imagining Nabokov: Russia...

The sixth volume of the personal correspondences of British literary giant T. S. Eliot The letters of T. S. Eliot collected in this sixth volume were written during the years the Nobel Prize–winning poet, playwright, critic, and essayist called, “the happiest I can ever remember in my...

A master class on piano performance and pedagogy from the world-renowned concert pianist In this newly revised edition of a comprehensive guide to piano technique, performance, and music interpretation, renowned performing musician, recording artist, and teacher Boris Berman addresses virtually...

An invaluable introduction to the art and craft of musical composition from a distinguished teacher and composer This essential introduction to the art and craft of musical composition is designed to familiarize beginning composers with principles and techniques applicable to a broad range...

For those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immortality; that true immortality would be awful; and that we experience the kinds of losses in life that we will...