Announcing The Works of Charles Embree

 

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 

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