Women's Speaker Series: Renée Rosen, author of White Collar Girl
Fee: $22/$18 members - includes an autographed copy of White Collar Girl, refreshments by MKELocalicious and admission to the sculpture garden. Bronze Optical invites you to arrive early to browse a diverse, vibrant selection of frames--mirror provided, of course!--while they clean and tighten the screws in your current eyewear. Register by phone at 414-446-8794.
Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads continues her series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.
Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series, Bronze Optical, and Boswell Books welcome Renée Rosen, author of White Collar Girl, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Monday, November 16, 7-9 pm. Daniel Goldin and Jane Glaser of Boswell Books will start off the evening with a run-down of their recommendations for book clubs--a quick introduction to the new and noteworthy books available this fall.
In her novels author Renée Rosen expertly combines Chicago’s rich history with remarkable storytelling. Her first book, Dollface, was set in a 1920’s Chicago filled with flappers and gangsters like Al Capone. Her follow-up, What the Lady Wants, imagined the Gilded Age rise of the department store magnate Marshall Field. Now in White Collar Girl, Rosen transports readers back to The Windy City, exploring The Chicago Tribune newsroom in the 1950’s.
Based on Rosen’s extensive research and hours of interviews with former Chicago Tribune employees, White Collar Girl is set in the boisterous world of 1950’s Chicago where Jordan Walsh, a woman from a family of esteemed reporters and with connections to luminaries like Mike Royko, Nelson Algren, and Ernest Hemingway, struggles to be taken seriously when she’s hired as a society reporter at The Chicago Tribune. Like the other women at the Tribune, Jordan is labeled a ‘sob sister’ – a nickname given to them by their male colleagues who believe women are too emotional to be successful.
Every second of every day, something is happening. There’s a story out there buried in the muck, and Jordan Walsh wants to be the one to dig it up. But it’s 1955, and the men who dominate the city room of the Chicago Tribune have no interest in making room for a female cub reporter. Instead Jordan is relegated to society news, reporting on Marilyn Monroe sightings at the Pump Room and interviewing secretaries for the White Collar Girl column.
Even with her journalistic legacy and connections to local luminaries, Jordan struggles to be taken seriously. Of course, that all changes the moment she establishes a secret source inside Mayor Daley’s office and gets her hands on some confidential information. Now careers and lives are hanging on Jordan’s every word. But if she succeeds in landing her stories on the front page, there’s no guarantee she’ll remain above the fold.
"White Collar Girl is an unforgettable novel about an ambitious woman’s struggle to break into the male dominated newspaper world of the 1950s."
-- Sara Gruen, New York Times Bestselling Author of Water for Elephants and At the Water’s Edge
About the Author
As clichéd as it sounds, Renée is a former advertising copywriter who always had a novel in her desk drawer. When she saw the chance to make the leap from writing ad copy to fiction, she jumped at it. A confirmed history and book nerd, Renée loves all things old, all things Chicago and all things written.
A graduate of American University in D.C., Renée has contributed to many magazines and newspapers, including Chicago Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Complete Woman, DAME, Publisher’s Weekly and several other now sadly defunct publications. She is the bestselling author of What The Lady Wants: A Novel of Marshall Field and the Gilded Age, Dollface: A Novel of the Roaring Twenties and Every Crooked Pot. She lives in Chicago where she is currently working on a new novel about the Chicago blues and Chess Records coming from Penguin/Berkley fall 2016.
