The Fan Who Knew Too Much

A dazzling exploration of American culture—from high pop to highbrow—by acclaimed music authority, cultural historian, and biographer Anthony Heilbut, author of the now classic The Gospel Sound (“Definitive” —Rolling Stone), Exiled in Paradise, and Thomas Mann (“Electric”—Harold Brodkey). In The Fan Who Knew Too Much, Heilbut writes about art and obsession, from country blues singers and male sopranos to European intellectuals and the originators of radio soap opera—figures transfixed and transformed who helped to change the American cultural landscape. Heilbut writes about icons like Aretha Franklin, the longest-lasting female star of our time. He writes about gays in the Pentecostal church, the black church’s rock and shield for more than a hundred years, as well as the German exiles who fled Hitler—Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Marlene Dietrich, and others—and their long reach into the world of American science, art, politics, and literature. Heilbut also explores the evolution of the soap opera: the form itself and how it catered to social outcasts and have-nots. The Fan Who Knew Too Much is a revelatory look at some of our American icons and iconic institutions, high, low, and exalted.