About | Rachel Shteir

About the Author

Rachel Shteir is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in national magazines and newspapers including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of three previous books: Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show (Oxford University Press, 2004), Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (Yale University Press, 2009), and The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting (The Penguin Press, 2011). She is also the founder and current head of the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism Program at The Theatre School at DePaul University. She holds a DFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama and a BA in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago.

Photo by Doug McGoldrick.

More praise for Rachel Shteir:

Gypsy: The Art of the Tease

"An elegant and insightful study."

—Carl Rollyson, The Wall Street Journal

"That [Gypsy's] star rose during the economically catastrophic '30s was no accident: her demure flirtation—as sly a construct as her breakaway gowns—was not only sexy but wickedly funny, a tonic for the worst of times."

—Cathleen Medwick, O, The Oprah Magazine

"It is simply impossible... not to fall in love with Gypsy's tenacity, wit and confounding, beguiling, oh-so-American mix of self-mythology and self-awareness."

—Lily Burana, The Washington Post

"The best introductory book on the magnificent Gypsy Rose Lee, a woman whose name has come to connote the importance of the sexual gimmick and the eroticism of the undelivered promise."

—Toni Bentley

"The best kind of cultural biography and the most serious history to date of the burlesque and striptease tradition."

—Francine Du Plessix Gray

"Rachel Shteir is one of the fresh thinkers about things American that have usually been dismissed as vulgar and are too often responded to in kind. Hers is the gift for finding the humanity that always lies inside the encasements of the facts and the statistics. Consequently, the combination of a subtlety, warmth, scholarship, and low-keyed wit make her work especially exceptional in a time like ours"

—Stanley Crouch