Books and Films
Bet Van Lew is a major character in The Secrets of Mary Bowser, a novel by former college professor Lois Leveen. The novel became a Target book club pick in August of 2012.
The 1987 television movie A Special Friendship tells a fictionalized story of the friendship and pro-Union collaboration of Van Lew (who is presented as a young, rather than middle-aged, woman in the film) and her former slave Mary Bowser. The 1990 television movie Traitor in My House tells the story of ELizabeth Van Lew from the perspective of her niece; Mary Kay Place portrays Elizabeth.
Her story was also fictionalized in 1995 children's book The Secret of the Lion's Head by Beverly Hall, and in the 2006 novel, Only Call Us Faithful: A Novel of the Union Underground by Marie Jakober.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Van Lew
Famous quotes containing the words books and/or films:
“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)