“A big part of the story is lost when it becomes a movie” Warren Miller’s The Cool World and Shirley Clarke’s Adaptation

Abstract

My thesis will discuss Warren Miller’s novel The Cool World (1959) and Shirley Clarke’s film adaptation (1963). The first part of my thesis will cover the Civil Rights Movement and life in Harlem. In the second part, I will contextualize Miller as a writer and provide an analysis of his novel. In the third part, I will concentrate on the director Shirley Clarke, pointing out her revolutionary story as a woman artist in the time in which she lived and worked. In the fourth and last part, I will briefly discuss novel-to-film adaptation theories and analyse The Cool World (1963)