Focusing on stardom during the 1920s, this title reveals strong connections and dissonances in matters of storytelling and performance that can be traced both backward and forward, across Europe, Asia, and the United States, from the silent era into the emergence of sound.

Douglas Fairbanks : king of Hollywood
Buster Keaton : comic invention and the art of moving pictures
The Talmadge sisters : a forgotten filmmaking dynasty
Rudolph Valentino : Italian American
An appetite for living : Gloria Swanson, Colleen Moore, and Clara Bow
Greta Garbo : fashioning a star image
Anna May Wong : toward Janus-faced, border-crossing, "minor" stardom
Emil Jannings : translating the star
Al Jolson : the man who changed the movies forever
African American stardom inside and outside of Hollywood : Ernest Morrison, Noble Johnson, Evelyn Preer, and Lincoln Perry
Marie Dressler : thief of the talkies
In the wings