Some of the twentieth century's most important artists and writers--from Jackson Pollock to Saul Steinberg, Frank O'Hara to Jean Stafford--lived and worked on the East End of Long Island years before it assumed an alternate identity as the Hamptons. The home they made there, and its effect on their work, is the subject of these searching, lyrical vignettes by the critic and poet Robert Long.

Pollock moved to Springs because he thought he wanted to stop drinking, but he found a connection to nature there that inspired some of the most significant paintings of our time. Others followed him. When Fairfield Porter bought a house in Southampton, the New York School suddenly had a new headquarters, and James Schuyler and Frank O'Hara found companionship and raw material for their poems on South Main Street and on the three-hour train ride between the city and the East End. Willem de Kooning rode his bike every day between his studio in the East Hampton woods and the bay, where the light informed every brushstroke he put to canvas from the early 1960s on.

In De Kooning's Bicycle Long mixes storytelling with history to re-create the lives and events that shaped American art and literature as we know it today, in a landscape where town met country and the modern met America's rural past.

"In a series of vividly told vignettes, critic and poet Long (Blue) illustrates how the East End of Long Island indelibly etched a mark on the style and work processes of the abstract impressionists and their artistically minded friends. For artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and their respective wives, Lee Krasner and Elaine, the Hamptons were a creative playground in the 1950s. Long reimagines their lives there in stories told from the artists' points of view. Pollock, aka Jack the Dripper, and Krasner moved to the East End in 1945 in an attempt to curb the infamous inebriate's drinking and stimulate his talent, and Long cleverly narrates Pollock's artistic methods. When the artist 'unleashed screaming ribbons of cadmium yellow, it was like a hot trumpet solo,' Long writes, likening his painting process to jazz improvisations. Former MoMA curator Frank O'Hara, Fairfield Porter, Jean Stafford and New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg receive similarly poetic treatment, but it's with titans like Pollock and de Kooning that Long best captures the spirit of modernism as filtered through New York's rural past. Agent, Patricia Van der Leun." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Some of the 20th century's most important artists and writers lived and worked on the east end of Long Island years before it assumed its alternate identity as the Hamptons. The homes they made there, and the effect on their work, is the subject of these searching, lyrical vignettes.

Robert Long is the editor of Long Island Poets and a contributor to The New Yorker and The Partisan Review, among other publications. He lives in East Hampton, New York.