A Life of Barbara Stanwyck Steel-True 1907-1940 by Victoria Wilson

This book (Simon and Schuster, 2013) of over 1000 pages (including notes and index) only covers the first 33 years of Stanwyck's life.  Terry Teachout, in Commentary, said that no biography (with some exceptions) should be over 400 pages.  But this is not just a biography of Stanwyck, it's also a biography of Frank Fay and Robert Taylor, Stanwyck's two husbands, and a history of film and theatre in the early 20th Century.  And all of it is fascinatingly written and thoroughly researched,  Yes, Wilson does take too seriously much of what was written in fan magazines and I did get tired of the lists of who attended Thalberg's funeral, who was at what party and who was at the racetrack on Christmas day, etc;, but these are minor quibbles. Stanwyck made more than thirty films during this period, only a few of which have much artistic merit (The Miracle Woman, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, both directed by Frank Capra) but Stanwyck was learning her craft and fighting for good scripts, which is why her career flourished and Kay Francis's, for example, did not.  The book ends with one of her best films:  Remember the Night, written by Preston Sturges (who later directed her elegantly in the very funny The Lady Eve). and directed by Mitch Leisen.  It was only after 1940 that Stanwyck started to pay enough attention to the choice of director, as Bette Davis had already been doing for some time.  It was then that her career truly soared, as she worked with sympathetic directors Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Howard Hawks, Robert Siodmak, Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang, Allan Dwan, Gerd Oswald, and Samuel Fuller.