Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
Categories
Politics & government

DAUGHTER OF DARING

Mallory O'Meara

The Trick-Riding, Train-Leaping, Road-Racing Life of Helen Gibson, Hollywood's First Stuntwoman

From LA Times bestselling author Mallory O'Meara, the story of America's first professional stuntwoman, Helen Gibson, who rose to fame during a time when women ruled Hollywood.

Helen Gibson was a woman willing to do anything to give audiences a thrill. Advertised as "The Most Daring Actress in Pictures," Helen emerged in the early days of the twentieth-century silent film scene as a rodeo rider, background actor, stunt double, and eventually one of the era's biggest action stars. Her exploits on motorcycles, train cars, and horseback were as dangerous as they were glamorous, featured in hundreds of films and serials--yet her legacy was quickly overshadowed by the increasingly hypermasculine and male-dominated evolution of cinema in the decades that would follow her. Award-winning author Mallory O'Meara presents her life and career in exhilarating detail, including: Helen's rise to fame in The Hazards of Helen, the longest-running serial in history How Helen became the first-ever stuntwoman in American film The pivotal role of Helen's contemporaries--including female directors, stars, and stuntwomen who shaped the making of cinema as we know it. Through the page-turning story of Helen's pioneering legacy, Mallory O'Meara gives readers a glimpse of the Golden Age of Hollywood that could have been: an industry where women call the shots. Mallory O'Meara is the bestselling author of The Lady from the Black Lagoon, which won the 2019 SCIBA award for Biography and the 2019 Rondo award for Book of the Year; Girly Drinks, which won a 2022 James Beard Award; and Girls Make Movies, which was a 2023 Junior Library Guild Gold Selection. Every week, she co-hosts the popular literary podcast Reading Glasses. She lives in the mountains near Los Angeles with her two cats, where she is working on her next book. You can follow Mallory on Instagram @malloryomeara or visit her website malloryomeara.com.

Available products
Book Published 2025-02-18 by Hanover Square Press

Comments

Just as she did in her stellar biography, The Lady from the Black Lagoon (2019), O'Meara evokes a bygone Hollywood era in this look at the life of stuntwoman Helen Gibson against the backdrop of Tinseltown's earliest days. Both a biography of Gibson and a sharp-eyed look at the evolution of Hollywood and women's involvement in it, O'Meara's third popular history is witty, wise, and winning.

Entertaining and educational, Daughter of Daring will attract and inspire readers of all ages.

A thrilling, swashbuckling feat of a book. In O'Meara's passionate, knowledgeable hands, the life of Helen Gibson, America's first ever female stunt double, becomes a prism for a sweeping cultural history of a golden age before the Golden Age, a battling bygone era when Los Angeles was a 'city of girls' and female filmmakers were entrepreneurs and artists with independence and agency. DAUGHTER OF DARING restores both Gibson and her contemporaries to their rightful place in the early days of Hollywood, when the American film industry was still young and venturesome, barrelling at breakneck speed to create itself.

The book was as vivacious and thrilling as the career it tracks. An inspiring reminder that as women in Hollywood, we're not carving a path - we're reminding the world of our legacy. It was a fast-paced and fun history of Hollywood roped together by the amazing life of Helen Gibson. Seriously made me proud to be a woman working in film.

A wide-ranging rodeo of a book.Comes at you as fast and as powerful as a runaway train.

O'Meara's colloquial, engagingly written biography recounts the life and times of Helen Gibson (18921977), an action rider, vaudevillian, and actor in both silent and sound films.Practitioners in women's and cinema history and general readers will appreciate information about this trailblazing pioneer.

Gibson's death-defying feats astound, and O'Meara provides perceptive context on the era's gender politics.an enthralling tribute to an early Hollywood pioneer.