Yale University Press will publish The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon in February 2011.

This video, produced for the University of Southern California, features a reading from the section on Peg Entwhistle’s suicide accompanied by some beautiful archival images, as well as a discussion of the book and of Leo Braudy’s teaching at USC.

Susan Andrews of the USC College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences interviewed Leo about his forthcoming book on the Hollywood sign. The video can be found below, as well as a link to the full text of the article.

Commanding, evocative and unmistakable. With nine white steel and concrete letters standing 30 feet wide and 45 feet tall, the Hollywood Sign is one of the most recognized symbols in the world.
The sign is also the subject of Leo Braudy’s twelfth book, The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon, which will appear in 2011 as one in a series of books about American icons to be published by Yale University Press. In the book, Braudy discusses the complex history of the Hollywood Sign and its interaction with the history of Hollywood, as a real and fantasized place.
A teacher, cultural theorist, film critic, and expert on 17th-century literature, Braudy is fascinated most by the interaction of things that seem disparate or far apart from each other. “In my mind, the seemingly disconnected fields nurture and feed upon one another, and it’s less about the individual parts.”

Read the rest of the article here.