A Chance Meeting

January 26, 2004
Though writers are notorious loners, they often form bonds with their peers. By focusing on these irregular alliances, Cohen, in her book debut, provides an engrossing, if simplistic, cavalcade of American arts from the Civil War period through the 1960s. She has selected 30 American artists (mostly writers) and produced admirably vivid portraits of their friendships with their fellow artists. The picturesque and piquant are paramount in Cohen's method—Marianne Moore sports a tricorn hat, Elizabeth Bishop sips coffee in Brazil. Though her anecdotes will be familiar to cognoscenti, Cohen does a fair job of digesting and recapitulating Leon Edel's Henry James, Arnold Rampersad's Langston Hughes, Justin Kaplan's Twain et al. into pointillist chunks that have their own febrile charm. The visual arts are represented largely by portrait photographers such as Steichen, Van Vechten and Richard Avedon. Since their circles of acquaintance were larger, the gregarious and extroverted get more space in Cohen's presentation. This has the effect of skewing the big picture of American letters into a continuous cocktail party. And while Cohen shines at description—taking the reader into the streets and into the parlors of a dozen different eras—the book as a whole suffers from a persistent use of what Cohen calls "guesswork," including imagined conversations and invented characters that lend a novelistic sheen to the proceedings. Never less than readable, this book bears the same relation to history as Irving Stone's once-celebrated treatments of notable lives (Lust for Life
, The Agony and the Ecstasy
)—only he called his fantasias "novels."

November 1, 2003
Henry James and Mathew Brady. Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin. Cohen shows how encounters like these have shaped American cultural life, in a study that won the 2003 Pen/Jerard Fund Award in manuscript.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2004
Creative inspiration often takes the form of friendships and rivalries, and the synergy within artistic and literary circles greatly intrigues scholars, although few have taken as insightful an approach to art and literature's mutuality as newcomer Cohen. Surveying American art and literature during the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, she reveals significant and often surprising connections among 30 trailblazing individuals, in vividly anecdotal and gracefully linked essays. Cohen begins in 1854 when 11-year-old Henry James and his father pose for a daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady. Readers then witness William Dean Howells befriending James, Walt Whitman (also photographed by Brady), and Mark Twain. As the spiral Cohen puts in motion spins forward in time, it gathers up photographers Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz, artists Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell, and writers Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Nora Zeale Hurston, Marianne Moore, James Baldwin, and Norman Mailer. In her fresh and revelatory portraits and analysis, Cohen assesses each creative individual's impact on American culture and each other in light of issues related to class, race, sexual orientation, politics, and aesthetics. Talk about bringing cultural history to life: this is a veritable party.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)