Writers: Photographs

Here are more than a hundred wonderful and sensitive duotone portraits of our major novelists, poets, and playwrights. Paired with the photographs are fascinating texts from each writer on writing—thoughts on the craft, recollections of significant moments from their personal history, meditations on the civic importance of writing, and so forth. Some of these photographs are well known—Bellow, Mailer, Cheever, and Capote—and others have never before been published. Many were taken on location, from Muriel Spark in Tuscany and James Baldwin in Provence to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Mexico City. All are strikingly fresh and authentic. The pithy and idiosyncratic thoughts on writing are a perfect complement to the superb portraits; often words and pictures seem to exist in a magical rapport. For all of us who care about the American literary scene, Nancy Crampton's gift is an intimate look at our literary heroes, our Writers. 104 duotone photographs.