The Ocean Is Closed: Journalistic Adventures and Investigations

Product Description

“Bradshaw was a famously charming man, and his lounge-lizard urbanity fully suffuses his prose. This new anthology is a necessary book for all men and women of letters.” ―Martin Amis
A collection of magazine writer Jon Bradshaw’s essential writings,
The Ocean is Closed rediscovers a memorable talent, and offers us a shadow reality to the established literary canon of the mid-century. With droll wit and keen intelligence, Bradshaw’s cinematic prose brings the ’70s to vibrant life―from the lurid pick-up scenes at hotspots like Maxwell’s Plum in New York, and the Beverly Hills Hotel in L.A., to full-bodied portraits of literary figures such as W.H. Auden and Tom Stoppard; affectionate profiles of hustlers and con men such as Bobby Riggs and Minnesota Fats, to chilling reportage about street gangs in the Bronx, terrorism in Germany, and mercenary freedom fighters in India.
Jon Bradshaw, a man of tremendous personal charm, good humor and rugged beauty, was a literary concoction of his own devising: the magazine writer as world-weary traveler and man about town. Adored by British royalty, magazine editors, movie executives, and professional mercenaries, alike, Bradshaw first made a splash in London during the Swinging Sixties. Pals with the likes of Anna Wintour, Timothy Leary, Gore Vidal, and Martin Amis, his career flourished at a time when magazines were at the center of the cultural conversation, delivering stories that were talked about for weeks. For twenty years, he cut a distinct figure in this world, before his untimely death. A forgotten master of longform magazine writing, Bradshaw is ripe for rediscovery as one of the sharpest chroniclers of his age.

Review

“A long-overdue anthology of writings by a great―and now largely forgotten―long-form journalist. Charming, handsome, and erudite, Bradshaw, who died in 1986 at age 48, surprised no one when Mick Jagger crossed a room to spend an hour chatting with him. Said biographer A. Scott Berg, according to editor Belth, ‘he was possibly the most social animal I ever knew.’ Yet while the parties were in full swing, Bradshaw would get to his typewriter, writing impeccable stories that embodied top-flight literary journalism…Exemplary journalism by a writer who deserves to be in every nonfiction anthology and textbook henceforth.” ―
Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Review

“Bradshaw had an unerring ability to find himself in the midst of the action, and an admirable willingness to at once wallow in it and share the experience with us mere mortals… One has to appreciate Bradshaw’s engaging ability to plumb the depths and skim the surfaces of so wide a collection of people and places, and to write in a style all his own.
The Ocean Is Closed is a fitting tribute to a writer who might otherwise be forgotten, a magazine writer’s writer, whose talent and personality was such that all doors seemed open to him.”―The Los Angeles Review of Books

About the Author

Jon Wayne Bradshaw―who was known as “Bradshaw”―was born in 1937 in New York. His parents split up when he was young and Bradshaw and his younger brother, James, were sent to boarding school in Pennsylvania. As a young man, Bradshaw eschewed a college education―although he took classes here and there―for life on the road and then apprenticeships as a young reporter in newspapers, like the New York Herald Tribune.
Bradshaw moved to England in 1963, his home base for the next dozen years. He worked first in newspapers and by the end of the decade was a freelance magazine writer and frequent contributor to Queen, an old society magazine then in the midst of a revival, as well as the features editor of
British Vogue. By the end of the decade, Bradshaw was a freelancer writing about restaurants and hot spots and spaghetti westerns, profiling the likes of John Osborne, Norman Mailer, Julie Christie, and the Beatles. But his favorite pieces were the travel features that took him to Monte Carlo, Pamplona