PRESS RELEASE
March 10, 2026
One Mind Good Press For Immediate Release www.onemindgoodpress.com
Contact: info@onemindgoodpress.com
Announcing the publication of THE
WORKS OF CHARLES EMBREE
The unusual life and imaginative works of writer, painter, and musician
Charles Embree (1919–2018), a well-connected though little-known figure in
American arts and letters, come to light in a new three-volume collection
edited by Gideon Rappaport. Embree’s published short stories in the jazz-age
idiom, collaborations with a variety of jazz and blues greats, witty
philosophical essays, and novel, dubbed “the first ontological novel” by
publishing legend Clifton Fadiman, merit the attention of anyone interested in
the music of the mid-twentieth century and in the accessible and entertaining
treatment of questions like Yeats’s “How can we know the dancer from the
dance?”—“or the dancing” Embree adds—and what it means that “the eye cannot see
itself.”
A distant cousin of Mark Twain, Embree was born in Missouri, studied
with the painter Thomas Hart Benton, served as a photographer and cartoonist
for the navy during World War II, then became a member of the renowned Iowa
Writers’ Workshop (1946–51), where he was a contemporary and friend of Flannery
O’Connor. His popular short stories appeared in the pages of Esquire for over a decade (1947–58). Arriving in Hollywood, Embree
became a scriptwriter for the entertainer Eddie “Rochester” Anderson of The
Jack Benny Program and the only white man to travel through the Jim Crow
south with Anderson’s off-season troupe of black performers. An accomplished
musician, he wrote songs for Julia Lee (“Blues for Someone”) and Scatman
Crothers (“Dead Man’s Blues”), guest lectured at UCLA on the history of jazz, and
recorded Room at the Bottom, an album of his own songs that author
Ray Bradbury lauded and Fadiman called “cheerful and wickedly barbed.” For a day
job he worked as a story editor, assessing scripts for the Warner Brothers,
Columbia, Paramount, MGM, and Walt Disney studios. After retirement he finished
his novel, The Descent of the Mop, and wrote witty philosophical essays and
poems on what he saw as the fundamentally three-in-one nature of reality. Among the many renowned who counted him a
friend were musicians Harry “The Hipster” Gibson and Johnny Mercer; authors
Stephen Ambrose, Joseph Epstein, and Stanley Wolpert; screenwriter Ketty Frings
(“Look Homeward Angel,” “Come Back, Little Sheba”); California appellate court
justice Arthur Gilbert; and Ambassador to Russia Walter Stoessel.
The
Works of Charles Embree in three volumes:
Volume
1: The Descent of the Mop—Embree’s
novel, set on what its denizens called “The Block” in midtown Manhattan in the
1940s, depicts the narrator’s sexual and spiritual awakening to the difference
between image and reality, inspired by the spirit of jazz in the B-flat blues,
which emerges as archetypal woman from the awe-evoking clarinet of The Mop.
(83 pages—ISBN: 979-8-218-59195-3) (83 pages)
Volume 2: The Third
Thing Thing: The Philosophy of Judge Bat T. Savannah—accessible, witty, and surprising philosophical essays on the triadic
structure of reality—subject, object, and relation—as taught by the wise and
ironical Bat T. Savannah, the fictional judge in The Descent of the Mop, who taps his gavel to the rhythms of the blues
and finds unexpected truth in some unappreciated notions of thinkers from Plato
to Heisenberg.
(172 pages—ISBN:
979-8-218-59196-0)
Volume 3: Shorter Works—Embree’s
dozen Esquire stories, plus song
lyrics, philosophical essays, poems (“I Knew Mr. Prufrock,” “Light Is the
Evidence for Things Not Seen”), and reminiscences, like interpreting for
Flannery O’Connor, hoping for a Jack Benny mistake, providing Julia Lee’s
greatest hit, traveling with Bobby Troup, writer of “(Get Your Kicks on) Route
66,” and a late-night supper with President Ronald Reagan.
(539 pages—ISBN:
979-8-218-59197-7)
The
Works of Charles Embree, edited by Gideon Rappaport,
published by One Mind Good Press
Order
wherever books are sold.
