A Chance Meeting - Hardcover

Cohen, Rachel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224072587 ISBN 13: 9780224072588

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2004

Synopsis

Each chapter of A Chance Meeting takes up an actual encounter between two historical figures. As Rachel Cohen writes in her introduction: 'They met in ordinary ways - a careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend's casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks. They talked to each other for a few hours or for forty years, and later it seemed to them impossible that they could have missed each other.' A Chance Meeting opens with a young Henry James in the studio of the great Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, and captures the boy in a moment of exquisite self-consciousness about being American. Later in the book Brady will return with Walt Whitman and with Ulysses Grant, while Henry James reappears with William Dean Howells and Sarah Orne Jewett. Cohen brilliantly reanimates such unforgettable pairings as Grant and Mark Twain; William James and W. E. B. Du Bois; 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. In all, thirty figures

About this title

Review:

"'The stories are as lively as a novel, the procession of characters fascinating'" (Times)

"'vivacious biographical snapshots'" (Helen Zaltzman Observer)

From the Publisher:

A unique American cultural history that considers defining relationships among writers and artists who knew and influenced each other over the course of a century.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0224072587
• ISBN 13: 9780224072588
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384