Maurice Zolotow

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Maurice Zolotow (b. in 1917, died 1991) was a renowned show-business biographer, both of books (his book Marilyn Monroe was the first written on the iconic actress, and the only one published while she was alive)and magazine articles, for publications including Life, Collier's Weekly, Reader's Digest, Los Angeles, and many others. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he met his future wife Charlotte Shapiro (Charlotte Zolotow, children's book writer and editor), he took his first job at Billboard, then a publication covering not just the music business but all aspects of show business. Zolotow was an early jazz-lover, and gave Duke Ellington his first national review. He remained devoted to pop culture, literature (one of his closest friends was the poet Delmore Schwartz), politics, and magic (another friend, in later life, was Ricky Jay, and Zolotow recalled seeing Houdini perform at Coney Island as a child, and wrote a novel, The Great Balsamo, based on him).

Subjects of his other books include John Wayne (Shooting Star), Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (Stagestruck) and Billy Wilder (Billy Wilder in Hollywood). He wrote shorter profiles of celebrities ranging from Tallulah Bankhead to Walter Matthau to Grace Kelley to Milton Berle. References to his magazine work and his compilation of shorter profiles, It Takes All Kinds, may be found in Wikipedia under entries for Jack Webb, Samuel Sorenson Adams, and Richard Himber.

He lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York for much of his adult life, but after his divorce in 1969, moved to Los Angeles, California. He had two children, poker player Stephen Zolotow and author Crescent Dragonwagon.