The Attentive Eye

About the Book

This book is an album of the famous and infamous seen through the attentive eye of the late journalist Helen Dudar—“a writer,” as the editor’s preface remarks, “of wit, grace, rigor, intellect and astonishing range.” In these pages, Paul Cézanne cohabits with John Updike, Sigmund Freud with Shelley Winters, Michael Douglas with Malcolm X; Dylan Thomas and Janice Joplin are discovered sleeping under the same roof, although in different beds and at different times; Woody Allen is encountered as a young comic on the way up, Henry Kissinger as a world leader on the way down, Norman Mailer as an office-seeker on the way nowhere. The threads binding them together in these fifty-two stories are Dudar’s luminous prose, her authoritative voice, and her keen, ironic vision. “She is a writer’s writer, a journalist’s journalist, and a reporter’s reporter,” the filmmaker Nora Ephron says in her introduction. “...Helen Dudar writes frequently about everything and does it better than just about anyone else.”
                  The Editor

About the Author

For the last half of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, Helen Dudar has been one of America’s premier newspaper and magazine writers. She has been a staff member at Newsday in Long Island and at the Post and Daily News in New York; a member of the journalists’ cooperative Writers Bloc, and a contributor to many publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, New York, American Film, Connoisseur, Saturday Review, Allure, Art in America, and, for the past twenty years, Smithsonian. Among other honors, she was one of three winners of the first Meyer Berger Awards for excellence in reporting. This book is her first.