Audiobooks by James McGrath Morris

The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War

After meeting for the first time on the front lines of World War I, two aspiring writers forge an intense twenty-year friendship and write some of America's greatest novels, giving voice to a "lost generation" shaken by war. Eager to find his way in life and words, John Dos Passos first witnessed the horror of trench warfare in France as a volunteer ambulance driver retrieving the dead and seriously wounded from the front line. Later in the war, he briefly met another young writer, Ernest Hemingway, who was just arriving for his service in the ambulance corps. When the war was over, both men knew they had to write about it; they had to give voice to what they felt about war and life. Their friendship and collaboration developed through the peace of the 1920s and 1930s, as Hemingway's novels soared to success while Dos Passos penned the greatest antiwar novel of his generation, Three Soldiers. In war, Hemingway found adventure, women, and a cause. Dos Passos saw only oppression and futility. Their different visions eventually turned their private friendship into a bitter public fight, fueled by money, jealousy, and lust. Rich in evocative detail--from Paris cafes to the Austrian Alps, from the streets of Pamplona to the waters of Key West--The Ambulance Drivers is a biography of a turbulent friendship between two of the century's greatest writers, and an illustration of how war both inspires and destroys, unites and divides.

James McGrath Morris (Author), Dean Temple (Narrator)

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The Rose Man of Sing Sing

Today, seventy-three years after his death, journalists still tell tales of Charles E. Chapin. As city editor of Pulitzeras New York Evening World, Chapin was the model of the take-no-prisoners newsroom tyrant: he drove reporters relentlesslyaand kept his paper in the center ring of the circus of big-city journalism. From the Harry K. Thaw trial to the sinking of the Titanic, Chapin set the pace for the evening press, the CNN of the pre-electronic world of journalism. In 1918, at the pinnacle of fame, Chapinas world collapsed. Facing financial ruin, sunk in depression, he decided to kill himself and his beloved wife Nellie. On a quiet September morning, he took not his own life, but Nellieas, shooting her as she slept. After his trialaand one hell of a story for the Worldas competitorsahe was sentenced to life in the infamous Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. In this story of an extraordinary life set in the most thrilling epoch of American journalism, James McGrath Morris tracks Chapinas rise from legendary Chicago street reporter to celebrity powerbroker in media-mad New York. His was a human tragedy played out in the sensational stories of tabloids and broadsheets. But itas also an epic of redemption: in prison, Chapin started a newspaper to fight for prisoner rights, wrote a best-selling autobiography, had two long-distance love affairs, and tapped his prodigious talents to transform barren prison plots into world-famous rose gardens before dying peacefully in his cell in 1930. The first portrait of one of the founding figures of modern American journalism, and a vibrant chronicle of the cutthroat culture of scoops and scandals, The Rose Man of Sing Sing is also a hidden history of New York at its most colorful and passionate.James McGrath Morris is a former journalist, author of Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars, and a historian. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia, and teaches at West Springfield High School.

James McGrath Morris (Author), John H. Mayer (Narrator)

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