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© 2007 University of Chicago Library
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When quoting material from this collection, the preferred citation is: Stephen Longstreet. Collection, [Box #, Folder #], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library
Stephen Longstreet was born in New York in 1907, and moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey with his family during his youth. Longstreet studied in Paris and at Rutgers and Harvard Universities; graduating from the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (Parsons) in 1929.
On his return to the United States, his artistic style was considered "too modern" to sell, and he thus pursued a career as a magazine artist and cartoonist. His work was published in the New Yorker, Life, Colliers, and the Saturday Evening Post. In 1933 Longstreet began writing radio shows for John Barrymore, Bob Hope, and Rudy Valle. Longstreet made his living as an author, eventually publishing over a hundred books, which include the novels, Decade 1929-1939 (1940), The Pedlocks (1951), The Promoters (1957), Man of Monmartre (1958), The Crime (1959), and The Flesh Peddlers (1962).
His television scripts include a 1959 Civil War series, "The Blue and Gray," "All or Nothing" (1983), and "His Father's House" (1985). As a screenwriter, his first script was an adaptation of his novel The Gay Sisters (1941); he was awarded the Photoplay Gold Medal for the most popular film of 1948, The Jolson Story, received a California Golden Star (1949); and an Academy Award nomination (1952) for his screenplay for "Gauguin: The Greatest Show on Earth." Longstreet has served as professor of visual and performing art at the University of Southern California, and currently holds a chair in modern writing at the same institution.
Longstreet combined his talents as an author and artist with his interest in music. Longstreet published five books on jazz, illustrated with his own drawings and watercolors, including The Real Jazz Old and New (1956), Jazz from A-Z, A Graphic Dictionary (1989). Longstreet's artworks served as the basis for a 1989 exhibition in the Department of Special Collections, "Jazz-The Chicago Scene: The Art of Stephen Longstreet." The Longstreet watercolors, collages, and sketchbooks, a number of which were included in the show, were a gift to the University of Chicago Library from the artist. The watercolors and collages from the 1989 show, some of which are oversized, are arranged in the first series; the sketchbooks, which consist of groups of leaves, original sketches, drawings, and watercolors as distinct from groups of "photolithographs" form a second series.