Orson Welles

"Hello Americans examines the years from Citizen Kane to Macbeth in which Welles's Hollywood film career came apart. It offers a scrupulous analysis of the factors involved, revealing the immense and sometimes self-defeating complexities of Welles's temperament as well as some of the monstrous personalities with whom he had to contend. At the same time, the book gives full weight to the almost bewildering range of his activities beyond Hollywood: his serious but doomed attempts to be a radio comedian and stage magician, his flamboyant and financially disastrous endeavor to revive spectacular theatre single-handedly, his newspaper columns, the political activities into which he so passionately flung himself. And of course the films, as fascinating as they were flawed: The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey into Fear, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai. The thread that runs through all this apparently incoherent blur of inactivity is an often frustrated engagement with his native land, its faults, its dreams, its popular arts, its history. But by 1947, he had said all that he had to say to his fellow citizens; it was Goodbye Americans for two decades of endlessly experimental and innovative but essentially European work."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.