 In 2011 "The Hollywood Sign" appeared in Yale University Press's American Icons series.It traces the intertwined history of Hollywood and the Sign from the founding of the city as a prohibitionist enclave in the 1880s through the beginnings of the movies, the construction of the Sign in the 1920s as a real estate advertisement, and the mixed fortunes of both the Sign and the film business down to the present.In a departure from his scholarly work, Braudy published in 2013 a memoir of his life as a teenager entitled "Trying to be Cool