As Chris Epting tells Orange County Magazine, a legendary Marilyn moment on a humble Manhattan subway grate – at 52nd and Lexington, to be exact – was a direct inspiration for his writing career.
“This all started for me when I was a kid in New York. I was maybe 10 years old, and there was an article in the paper about Marilyn Monroe posing over a subway grate in The Seven Year Itch where her dress billows up famously. I didn’t know much about her at that age, but I went to see the subway grate the next time we were in the city. I thought, ‘I know what that is, and none of those thousands of people walking over it do.’ That’s when I first thought there must be hundreds of these places that people pass by every day.”
Epting is the author of 45 books covering travel, history and entertainment. His latest, It Happened Right Here, is one of five new titles due this year.
“Epting established a new genre in book publishing when a trio of titles in the early 2000s—James Dean Died Here: The Locations of America’s Pop Culture Landmarks, Elvis Presley Passed Here, and Marilyn Monroe Dyed Here—were released to critical acclaim and introduced readers to a groundbreaking travel concept: The pop culture road trip. Epting promptly followed these hugely popular and influential titles with two more legendary books: Led Zeppelin Crashed Here and Roadside Baseball.
Now, in honor of the 20th anniversary of James Dean Died Here, Epting has produced It Happened Right Here: America’s Pop Culture Landmarks, which collects the best of the best from all of Epting’s prior books, and then adds dozens and dozens of new sites, many of them based on the pop culture of the 21st century.
It Happened Right Here once again takes you on a journey across North America to the exact locations where the most significant events in American popular culture took place … Featuring hundreds of photographs, this fully illustrated, updated, and revised encyclopaedic ook at the locations of the most famous and infamous pop culture events includes the fascinating history of over a thousand landmarks—as well as their exact location.”
The Marilyn Report 