Gilbert Seldes

Gilbert Seldes photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932

Gilbert Vivian Seldes (January 3, 1893 – September 29, 1970) was an American writer and cultural critic. He was editor and drama critic of The Dial. He is most famous for his 1924 book, The Seven Lively Arts.

Born in Alliance, New Jersey, he attended Harvard University and was the New York correspondent for T. S. Eliot's The Criterion.

In the 1930s, Seldes adapted Lysistrata and A Midsummer Night's Dream for Broadway. Later he made films, wrote radio scripts and became the first director of television for CBS News and the founding dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The actress Marian Seldes is his daughter. The journalist George Seldes was his older brother.

Bibliography

• The United States and the War, 1917
• The Seven Lively Arts, 1924
• The Stammering Century, 1928
• An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies, 1929
• Movies for the Millions, 1937
• Proclaim Liberty!, 1949
• The Great Audience, 1951
• The Public Arts, 1964
• Writing for Television
• The Years of the Locusts
• The New Mass Media
• Your Money and Your Life
• Mainland
• Against Revolution
• The Stammering Century
• This is America
• The Movies Come from America
• The Movies and the Talkies
• The Future of Drinking
• The Wings of the Eagle
• Lysistrata (A Modern Version)

See also

• Seven Lively Arts

Further reading

• Kammen, Michael G. (March 1996). The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509868-4. 

External links

• Gilbert Seldes at Internet Broadway Database
• Gilbert Seldes at Internet Movie Database
• The Seven Lively Arts full text with appendices and illustrations from American Studies at the University of Virginia