<span style='font-size:12pt;line-height:100%'>Fortunate Son - The Life of Elvis Presley</span>
Charles L. Ponce de Leon
Days before his death, Elvis Presley saw a chance to earn the U.S. Marshal’s badge President Nixon had given him in the Oval Office back in 1970, where, in his bejeweled leisure suit, the drug-addicted Elvis had sworn himself to law and order. Spying a fight breaking out between two men and a gas station attendant, an overweight Elvis did his best to leap out of his limo and strike a karate pose. He was met with stunned disbelief and requests for autographs; when his police escort finally arrived, it was in hopes of a photo with the King.
In the 1950s Elvis was celebrity’s perfect storm. Gifted, charismatic, and telegenic, he was a rebel rooted in conservative Southern working-class morals. By the late 1960s, the storm had largely passed. A surging popular culture had upended those morals, and what had once seemed rebellious looked more and more reactionary. Far from daring and racy, Elvis’s moves seemed treacle; rather than trendsetting, his musical talent seemed grist for country ballads. Charles Ponce de Leon’s brilliant Fortunate Son succinctly places Elvis’s life within the larger shifts that redefined the cultural landscape during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, discovering in the mounting ironies of Elvis’s waning success the seeds of the mythology we live with today.
"Charles Ponce de Leon manages in this concise, probing, and extremely readable book on Elvis to accomplish what all historical biographers aspire to: to illuminate the man, the times, and the important relationship between the two. The reader is as fortunate as Elvis." —Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
"This smart and engaging biography is the first to understand Elvis as a key figure in the history of recent America. Instead of an icon, both worshipped and mocked, Ponce de Leon reveals a man pulled under by the same celebrity culture that had made him." —Michael Kazin, author of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan
Praise for Self Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940:
"A fascinating contribution to one of the most important developments of modern America. One has only to think for a moment about contemporary culture to wish to know where our obsessions with celebrity come from and, more profoundly, what impact celebrating celebrity has had on our civilization."-James B. Gilbert, University of Maryland at College Park
"Self-Exposure fills an important gap in historical scholarship, providing the first sustained consideration of how the notion of celebrity status emerged from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth. It should appeal to those interested in how journalists shaped American culture and the emergence of celebrities."-Daniel Horowitz, Smith College
Charles Ponce de Leon teaches history at the State University of New York, Purchase, and is the author of Self-Exposure: The Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940.
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