American Eve
Evelyn Nesbit,
Stanford White
The Birth of the "It" Girl,
And the Crime of the Century
Paula Uruburu
Reviewed by Megan Chance
While few people today probably know of Evelyn Nesbit, at the turn of the nineteenth century, she was known to millions in America and Europe as the face adorning postcards, illustrations, and advertisements. By the time she was fifteen years old, she was the favorite model of many photographers and artists. She was beautiful and alluring, innocent and sexy, and she had a millionaire patron whose name was synonymous with good taste and style. Stanford White was well-liked, very rich, and the designer of Central Park, Madison Square Garden, and countless other New York City icons. He was also the man who groomed and raped Evelyn Nesbit when she was sixteen years old, and who kept her as a mistress after.
Harry Thaw was a millionaire as well. He was also insane, and he had an obsessive interest in destroying Stanford White for his rumored debauchery of young women. He also groomed and raped Evelyn Nesbit, although he married her after. Then he shot and killed Stanford White in front of hundreds of witnesses at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden.
What ensued was what Ms. Uruburu refers to as the trial of the century, and it certainly was one of the first trials followed zealously and obsessively by the media and the masses. It was also a cultural touchstone, focused as it was on Evelyn Nesbit’s testimony of what transpired between her and Stanford White during their relationship, in all its salacious and fascinating detail.
AMERICAN EVE covers not just Evelyn Nesbit’s emergence and ascendence, but also offers the cultural context in which to ground it. The story is as compulsively readable as any train-wreck of a life can be, and although much of that has to do with the subject itself, Ms. Uruburu’s writing style often hits just the right melodramatic notes to lead the reader forward, complete with chapter-ending cliff-hangers and rhetoric questions. Although both Evelyn Nesbit and Harry Thaw chronicled the events this book describes in their autobiographies, Ms. Uruburu utilizes these sources and others to offer a fully rounded picture of events, including her own astute assessment of the world in which they happened.
AMERICAN EVE only highlights the fact that truth really is stranger than fiction. As Oscar Wilde once famously said: “The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” Unfortunately for Evelyn Nesbit, her tale was one of real-life, and AMERICAN EVE makes the most of it, allowing the reader to both understand what happened then and to draw parallels to the cult of celebrity that has all but swallowed American culture one hundred years later, destroying the lives of our young women as neatly as it always has.
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About the Reviewer:
Megan Chance is the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of several novels. Her first book won Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA award for excellence in Romantic Fiction, and since then, her novels have received several awards and award nominations. The Best Reviews has said she writes “Fascinating historical fiction.” A former television news photographer with a BA from Western Washington University, Megan Chance lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two daughters. Visit her website at www.meganchance.com.
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