Download or read book My Life East and West written by William Surrey Hart and published by New York : B. Blom. This book was released on 1929 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William S. Hart was, in a way, the personification of a United States that moved from hardscrabble frontier to flourishing industrial giant in the space of just a few generations. Born about 1864 to immigrant parents in Newburgh, New York, on the Hudson River, Hart grew up poor and ill-educated in the upper Midwest. He went off to Europe as a teenager to learn acting and spent twenty-five-years on the American stage. Mr. Hart moved to California to enter the motion-picture field in 1914. While a novice screen actor, he nevertheless had thorough stage training, and he had known the West when the West was a frontier, so reinventing himself as a cowboy hero and director of silent movies seemed inevitable. Decked out in Western finery, gazing with cool command over a pair of six-guns, Bill Hart became, in his fifties, an icon of the vanished American West which he loved passionately and wanted to preserve for the future. In 1939 Hart reissued "Tumbleweeds" (his last and perhaps greatest film), preceded by a famous eight- minute "Farewell to the Screen" introduction. He closed his Hollywood office and retired to Horseshoe Ranch near Newhall, California, as gentleman rancher and author. He died there in 1946, age 81, wealthy but alone.