Greasepaint Puritan

Greasepaint Puritan details the life and work of Bradford Ropes, author of the bawdy 1932 novel 42nd Street, on which the classic film and its stage adaptation are based. Inspired by Ropess own experiences as a performer, 42nd Street reads less like a novel than like a documentary about the lives of New Yorks theatre people and, above all, about the practicalities, the personalities, and the sexual politics that go into the making of a show, according to Richard Brody in The New Yorker. Why did Ropess body of workwhich included a trilogy of backstage novelsand consequently his biographical footsteps, disappear into obscurity? Descended from Mayflower Pilgrims, Ropes rebelled against the Proper Bostonian life, in a career that touched upon the Jazz Age, American vaudeville, and theater censorship. Greasepaint Puritan follows Ropess successful career as both a performer and the author of the backstage novels 42nd Street, Stage Mother, and Go Into Your Dance. Populated by scheming stage mothers, precocious stage children, grandiose bit players, and tart-tongued chorines, these novels centered on the lives and relationships of gay men on Broadway during the Jazz Age and Prohibition era. Rigorously researched, Greasepaint Puritan chronicles Ropess career as a successful screenwriter in 1930s and 40s Hollywood, where he continued to be a part of a dynamic gay subculture within the movie industry before returning to obscurity in the 1950s. His legacy lives on in the Hollywood and Broadway incarnations of 42nd Streetbut Greasepaint Puritan restores the forgotten melody of the man who first envisioned its colorful characters.