“A poignant addition to the literature of moneyed glamour and its inevitable tarnish and decay…like something out of Fitzgerald or Waugh.” – The New Yorker
Attend an informative virtual Book Talk with author and former New York Times reporter, Janny Scott, as she discusses the creation and eventual disintegration of the 800-acre estate that inspired the play and celebrated American film, The Philadelphia Story. Her grandmother, Helen Hope Montgomery Scott, said to have been the inspiration for the character of Tracy Lord, the role that resuscitated Katharine Hepburn’s career after a period as “box-office poison.”
Please join the Bryn Mawr Club of New York City for an evening with best-selling author and journalist Janny Scott as she discusses The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father — part family history, part detective story, part tale of a vanishing class. Set on the eight-hundred-acre, Gilded Age estate that inspired The Philadelphia Story, the book is a vivid exploration of the degree to which an inheritance – financial, cultural, genetic – conspired in one person’s self-destruction.
Scott’s father, Robert Montgomery Scott, was the longtime president and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a charming eminence grise on the city’s cultural scene. Her grandmother, Helen Hope Montgomery Scott, was reputed to have been a model for the character of Tracy Lord, the role that resuscitated Katharine Hepburn’s career after a period as “box-office poison.” The Beneficiary was one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2019 and one of NPR’s Favorite Books of 2019.
The New Yorker called The Beneficiary, now out in paperback, “a poignant addition to the literature of moneyed glamour and its inevitable tarnish and decay…like something out of Fitzgerald or Waugh.” The audiobook, narrated by the author, is available through Audible.
Janny Scott, who is also the author of A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, was a reporter for The New York Times for fourteen years, writing about race, class, demographic change, and ideas. She was a member of the Times reporting team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for the series “How Race Is Lived in America.” In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, she and Christine Kay, a Times editor, conceived Portraits of Grief, a series of thumbnail profiles of several thousand victims, which appeared in the Times every day for months. She was previously a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and The Record of Bergen County, New Jersey.
Her first book was the runner up for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and one of Time magazine’s top ten nonfiction books of 2011. She has appeared on The Colbert Report, Today, MSNBC, C-Span, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Leonard Lopate Show and other television and radio programs. She is a graduate of Harvard College and lives in New York City.
For more information, visit:
Janny Scott’s website
The Beneficiary: Details and Order Books Here
https://jannyscott.com/books/the-beneficiary/
Reviews and News
WHAT: Book Talk by Janny Scott on The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of my Father.
WHEN: Wednesday, July 8th at 7:00 PM.
WHERE: Please RSVP HERE for the new date. A Zoom Link will be provided the day of the event.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, CONTACT: Helen Thurston’74 at hthurston77@earthlink.net
I listened to the early part of the book talk on Janny Scott’s The Beneficiary. Is the book talk archived? Could I finish listening/watching it? If so, please let me know how.
thanks,
Galen