A Chance Meeting

Zusatztext

<p>Each chapter in this remarkable consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures.</p><p>In 1854, as a boy, Henry James has his daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady. We encounter Brady again as he photographs Walt Whitman and then Ulysses Grant. Meanwhile, Henry James begins a lasting friendship with William Dean Howells, and also meets Sarah Orne Jewett, who in turn is a mentor to Willa Cather...</p><p>Cohen brilliantly reanimates these unforgettable pairings and those of Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz; Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein; Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston; Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore; Richard Avedon and James Baldwin; and John Cage and Marcel Duchamp; Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell. Ultimately, Cohen reveals and long chain of friendship, rebellion and influence stretching from the moment before the Civil War through a century that had a profound effect on our own time.<i>A Chance Meeting</i>is an intimate and original act of biography and cultural history that makes its own contribution to the tradition about which Cohen writes.</p>

Autorenportrait

Rachel Cohen grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and graduated from Harvard. She has written for<i>The Threepenny Review,</i><i>McSweeney's</i>and other publications. Cohen, won the 2003 Pen/Jerard Fund Award for the manuscript of<i>A Chance Meeting</i>. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.

Weitere Details