Jane Kramer Biography
Jane Kramer (born August 7, 1938) is an American journalist who is the European correspondent for The New Yorker; she has written a regular “Letter from Europe” for twenty years. Kramer has also written nine books, the latest of which, Lone Patriot (2003), is about a militia in the American West. Her other books include The Last Cowboy, Europeans and The Politics of Memory.
She has a B.A. in English from Vassar College and an M.A. in English from Columbia University. She received a 1981 National Book Award Nonfiction. Her other awards include an Emmy Award for documentary filmmaking, National Magazine Award, and Front Page Award. Kramer is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a founding director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. She has taught at Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence, CUNY, and the University of California, Berkeley.
Jane Kramer Age
Kramer was born on December 7, 1938, in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. She is 80 years old as of 2018.
Jane Kramer Net worth
Kramer’s estimated net worth is under review.
Jane Kramer Valley Of The Bones
In April 2018, Jane Kramer returned to the studio to record her third full-length album. “Valley of the Bones” is a triumphant collection of original songs that illustrate and explore the expression human of love in all its various forms. Tracked mostly live (including the vocal performances,) at Sound Temple Studios in Asheville, N.C., Kramer teamed up with her frequent collaborators: Free Planet Radio musicians River Guerguerian, Chris Rosser and two-time Grammy Award winner Eliot Wadopian; as well as Billy Cardine. The album also includes performances by Nicky Sanders of The Steep Canyon Rangers on violin and Asheville Symphony Orchestra musician Franklin Keel on cello.
The collection of 10 original songs was engineered, mixed and produced by Adam Johnson of Sound Lab Studios and co-produced by Kramer and Chris Rosser. Kramer says of bringing the earliest, tentative versions of her songs to Johnson and Rosser for arrangement help and production ideas. While most of the afore-mentioned musicians accompanied Kramer on her acclaimed 2016 release Carnival of Hopes, listeners will hear a distinct difference in the band’s chemistry, cohesion and almost electric intuition with one another on Valley of the Bones.
“Simply put, it’s because we’ve been playing together a lot over the past three years since I’ve moved back home to Asheville,” she says. Valley of the Bones’ 10 strong songs tackles a breadth of subject matter, ranging from marriage to miscarriage. Spirituality and self-acceptance are expressed with poetic grace, vulnerability and unapologetically honest grit. Kramer’s endearing, self-effacing humor is also on full display. This warm, easy storytelling is paired with rich, nuanced arrangements that aren’t afraid to be simple when called for, and are punctuated with the unmistakably bittersweet southern wail of Billy Cardine’s dobro.
Standout tracks include the gutsy and reflective Hymn (which was a “homework assignment” from Mary Gauthier, Kramer’s musical mentor,) the undeniably smart and sassy Waffle House Song, and the profoundly poetic and transcendent title track Valley of the Bones. This song was dubbed a “masterpiece” by Lydia Hutchinson of Performing Songwriter Magazine. Also noteworthy is the quirky and hilarious country zinger. I’ll See Your Crazy and Raise You Mine and the sweet, earnest Singin’s Enough which speaks candidly of the struggles of a touring musician.
Jane Kramer New Yorker
Jane Kramer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1964 and has written the Letter from Europe since 1981.
Before joining the magazine, Kramer was a staff writer for the Village Voice; her first book, “Off Washington Square,” is a collection of her articles from that paper. Her first long pieces for The New Yorker became the books “Allen Ginsberg in America” (1969) and “Honor to the Bride” (1970), which was based on her experiences in Morocco in the late nineteen-sixties.
A notable exception to Kramer’s European reporting was her Profile, from 1977, of the pseudonymous Texan Henry Blanton. It was later published as a book, “The Last Cowboy” (1977), which won the American Book Award for nonfiction.
Jane Kramer Books
–Kramer, Jane (1963). Off Washington Square: a reporter looks at Greenwich Village. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pierce.
— (1969). Allen Ginsberg in America. Random House.
— (1970). Honor to the bride like the pigeon that guards its grain under the clove tree. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
— (1977). The last cowboy. Harper & Row.
— (1980). Unsettling Europe. Random House.
— (1988). Europeans. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
— (1993). Eine Amerikanerin in Berlin. Edition Tiamat.
— (1993). Sonderbare Europäer. Die Andere Bibliothek/Eichborn.
— (1994). Whose art is it?. Duke UP.
— (1996). Unter Deutschen. Edition Tiamat.
— (1996). The politics of memory: looking for Germany in the New Germany. Random House.
— (2002). Lone Patriot: the short career of an American militiaman. Random House.
— (2017). The reporter’s kitchen: essays. St. Martin’s Press.
Jane Kramer The Last Cowboy
‘The West that Henry mourned belonged to the Western movie, where the land and the cattle went to their proper guardians and brought a fortune in respect and power. It was a West where the best cowboy got to shoot the meanest outlaw, woo the prettiest schoolteacher, bed her briefly to produce sons, and then ignore her for the finer company of other cowboys – a West as sentimental and as brutal as the people who made a virtue of that curious combination of qualities and called it the American experience’ – From the Introduction. Henry Blanton is the ‘last cowboy’ of Jane Kramer’s classic portrait, the failed hero of his own mythology, the man who ends an era for himself. His story – his flawed, funny, and at the end tragic efforts to be a proper cowboy, ‘expressin’ right’ in a world where the range is a feed yard and college boys run ranches from air-conditioned Buicks – is the story of a country coming of age in the great promise and greater disappointment. A hundred and fifty miles up the highway from agri-business Amarillo, Henry claimed the extravagant prerogatives of a free man on a horse. He rode his own frontier, decked out in his vigilance and his honor, until the shocking moment when in the person of Henry Blanton the West and the Western had a showdown.