Dead Celebrities, Living Icons

This in-depth series of literary portraits studies celebrities who died in famous and tragic ways—ways that still resonate as archetypal death scenarios in present day.We know their likes and dislikes, admire their talents, envy them for daring to be what we can't or what we won't. When they are snatched from us, we feel a personal loss and an unwillingness to let go. And so we transform these mere human beings into icons whose stars often shine in death even more brilliantly than in life.Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar explores this phenomenon through a series of essays on 14 men and women who are, arguably, the most famous people of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The book covers the epoch of the celebrity beginning in the 1930s with Howard Hughes and Walt Disney and continues to the present day with the life and death of Michael Jackson. Far more than just a collection of biographies, Dead Celebrities, Living Icons documents the philosophical importance and significance of the contemporary cult of the celebrity and analyzes the tragic consequences of a human life lived in the glare of the media spotlight.13 essays on specific celebrities, each of which is a mini-biography

"Ebert, an independent scholar, examines the myth of media celebrity by looking at the lives of its archetypes: celebrities who have been transformed into icons after their deaths, many who died tragically. He looks at the lives of famous people from the 1930s to the present—Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison, John F. Kennedy, Andy Warhol, the Beatles, Ronald Reagan, Gianni Versace, Princess Diana, Heath Ledger, and Michael Jackson—how they illustrate the recent rise of the electronic media superstar in US culture, and why our society is obsessed with them, as they are slowly turned into modern equivalents of saints." - Reference & Research Book News

John David Ebert is an independent scholar.