From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com.

My guest writer David Tade, I think does books that we could call it safely, books on Creative American Ambition.

If we looked at his amazing biography of Billy Strayhorn, Lush Life, which asked a question at the very beginning in the preface.

What about Billy Strayhorn?

I think if you look at his new book on comics as social phenomenology,

the Tencent Plague, that question might be, what about Frederick Wortham? David, thanks so much

for being here. Thanks for having me on. But I do think the books have all been about this ambition

in America. These people kind of look down on what they do, a little bit of these comics writers.

They all sort of had other ambitions in some other kind of ways and found themselves an interestingly creatively realized by this thing that was in the

30s and 40s as big as movies. Right. I mean all three of the books are about various kinds of

ambition, not so much just ambition in the traditional sense and the careerist sense. There

about creative ambition.

And I think in all three cases about Utre ambition, about outsider status,

about outsiders of various kinds, seeking to express a pride in their identity as outsiders in one way or another,

certainly in the case of Billy Strayhorn, who was the closest thing to what we would call

being out or being open about it in the 1930s and 1940s, and that he never denied it, never

pretended to be anything other than what he was.

And then in the case of the Bob Dylan in his circle, we forget how radical folk music

was in its time and how radical the idea of doing something poetic and rock and roll was

at its time.

And here in this book, we have outsiders of all sorts trying to express oddball ideas

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