Twilight Man: Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire

Liz Brown's Twilight Man is an extremely well-researched biography of Harrison Post, the gay lover of William Andrews Clark Jr. (one of the richest men in 1920s Hollywood). Brown is a distant relative of Clark and her original interest in the subject was sparked when she spotted an intriguing photo of Post tucked away in a relative's old drawer. Over the next twenty years, Brown did an astonishing amount of work to piece together a quite detailed history from a fragmentary record of diaries, letters, government records and court transcripts. Twilight Man's profile of Post's and Clark's illicit love affair is decent, but the best sections of the book trace the history of L.A.'s urban development, the permissive yet repressive nature of Hollywood society, and the geology of the American West (much of the Clark family fortune originated in the copper mines of Montana).