Lael Morgan

Eskimo Star: From the Tundra to Tinseltown, the Ray Mala Story (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The blazing marquee of the plush Astor Theater in New York City billed the 1933 premier of Eskimo as "THE BIGGEST PICTURE EVER MADE," propelling a 27-year-old Inupiat Eskimo from Candle, Alaska, to overnight stardom. The handsome actor was not only the first Alaskan to become a Hollywood movie star but also the first non-white actor to play in a leading role. This is the story of Ray Wise Mala, the talented and enterprising son of an itinerant Russian trader and an Eskimo mother. Mala became part of the white man's world but for most of his life struggled to find a place in it, discriminated against because of his mixed race and his father's Jewish faith. At age 16, Mala got his break in Alaska in 1921 when hired to help film Primitive Love in which he was given a role. Mala appeared in more than 25 films over the next three decades, playing Hawaiians, South Pacific Islanders, American Indians, and other "exotics." Mala was a generous, sophisticated, self-made man from humble origins who straddled the gap between two cultures, never forgetting the debt he owed his own. Eskimo Star includes many historic photos and colorful movie posters.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Epicenter
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Juli 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781935347422
• Artikelnr.: 70622779

Autorenporträt

Lael Morgan was born in rural Maine, got her educational start in a two-room schoolhouse in East Vassalboro, and went on to become a drama major at Emerson College with no plans acquire a degree. In 1957 she transferred to Boston University School of Public Relations and Communications, while working a six-day week as a hotel night clerk with a double shift on Saturdays. She graduated cum laude in the summer of 1959 and traveled with her husband, Dodge, to Anchorage, Alaska, where she worked for an advertising agency. In 1963 the Morgans sailed half way around the world in a 36' schooner. On return in 1965, Lael moved back to Alaska while her husband pursued work on the east coast. They divorced in 1971 but remained on excellent terms.

Morgan stared her journalistic career as a writer for the Malden Press in 1958. Later she became a photojournalist at the Juneau Alaska Empire in Alaska's capitol city, and then covered crime and politics for the Fairbanks News Miner just south of the Arctic Circle. In 1969 she signed on as a reporter/photographer on to the Los Angeles Times where in 1970 she won the Photographer of the Year award for best photo feature. The award of an Alicia Patterson fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1972 helped her establish a national reputation reporting on Native Americans.

Lael Morgan at Anatuvak Pass, AlaskaMorgan subsequently embarked on a freelance career working for Alaska Northwest Publishing, the Washington Post, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and National Geographic Magazine. From 1974 to 1987 she served as roving reporter for Alaska Northwest Publishing which assigned her to visit every Alaska village named in the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement. Of the 220 that qualified she visited all but 13.
In 1988 Morgan won her master's degree from Boston University with a focus on publishing. Then, in 1988 with a partner Kent Sturgis, she established Epicenter Press, a regional house that now the major publisher of Alaska titles with has more than 100 books to its credit. That same year she joined the Department of Journalism and Broadcasting, University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she taught writing, photography, and multimedia.

In 1999, after serving three years as department chair, and winning a Fulbright to Fiji, Morgan returned to her native state to become managing editor of the Casco Bay Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Portland, Maine, owned by her form...