Souls for Sale

A preacher's daughter flees scandal and her father's condemnation of Hollywood, only to discover the silver screen demands more than she bargained for. Mem Steddon arrives in the movie colony with nothing but her virtue and the name Remember, hoping to rebuild. She finds work as an extra among the eccentrics and aspirants of early cinema, watching dreams inflate and collapse around her. But the road to stardom runs through compromises she never anticipated, and the industry that America wanted to believe in turns out to be messier, crueler, and more seductive than any Sunday sermon suggested. Written by the era's most chronicler of American life, this novel tears open the gap between the movies people wanted to believe in and the scrambling, morally flexible business actually making them.