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The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend 
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Glenn Frankel's 2013 book is the riveting true account of the kidnapping of a nine-year-old girl by Comanche warriors in 1836 and how that story was transformed into a frontier legend and ultimately into a classic American movie. It is the first mainstream book to focus on the making of John Wayne's greatest film, a John Ford movie that has inspired modern filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. The book was a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller and one of Library Journal's Top Ten books for 2013. It was hailed by film critic Leonard Maltin as a "towering achievement in chronicling a great film and its amazing backstory. The Searchers is a great book by any measure." 

 

 Praise for The Searchers: The Making

of an American Legend. ​

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A vivid, revelatory account of John Ford’s 1956 masterpiece. The New York Times

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Impeccably researched…a fascinating journey from fiction to fact, from glorified legend to brutal event.        The Washington Post

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Riveting…a gripping portrayal of a mesmerizing period of American history.

Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

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​A gracefully presented narrative…clearly written account of an obsessive search through the tangled borderland of fact and fiction, legend and myth.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)



 

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LISTEN TO GLENN'S INTERVIEW WITH WEEKEND
EDITION SUNDAY  ​HOST RACHEL MARTIN ON NPR
LISTEN TO GLENN'S INTERVIEW WITH
DIANE REHM ON NPR​
LISTEN TO GLENN DISCUSS 'THE SEARCHERS' AT POLITICS AND PROSE IN WASHINGTON D.C. VIA SLATE.COM ​​

"Frankel's excellent research and analysis and his fine writing raise the bar for the "making of" film book. His narrative details the life of a modern legend — in this case, a historical event that sparked a novel that led to a film, each step revealing a different aspect of how we tell our stories and why."

Douglass K. Daniel, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS​

"By connecting “The Searchers” to the facts of its distant origins, Frankel demonstrates how history and storytelling can become a unified force in national mythmaking."​ 

​Jeanine Basinger, THE WASHINGTON POST
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What place does John Ford's masterpiece occupy in our national consciousness? As Glenn Frankel puts it in The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, his fascinating new book about the picture and the history behind it, "The Searchers is perhaps the greatest Hollywood film that few people have seen."​

Martin Scorsese, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

"Frankel first began looking into Cynthia Ann's story when he heard it mentioned in a documentary about The Searchers, one of his favorite films. Frankel fell in love with The Searchers in the fall of 1969, watching it in a film class at Columbia taught by Andrew Sarris, who was at the time a Village Voice film critic."
Amy Gentry, THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE ​
 

"...Leslie Fied­ler published a slim volume making the case that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “The Birth of a Nation,” “Gone With the Wind” and “Roots” could be read as a single, multimedia “inadvertent epic” — a story about slavery, race and family that America gave to itself. As framed and enriched by Frankel, “The Searchers” is another such epic; recounting the making of what he calls “an American legend,” he has retold it well."

J. Hoberman, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Read Full Reviews:
Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy Blog
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch 
​THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE
Associated Press​
The New York Times
Martin Scorsese on 'The Searchers'

The Washington Post
NY Review of Books

 

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