A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967

They met in ordinary ways, writes Rachel Cohen in her introduction, 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.

Each chapter of this inventive consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. In 1854, Henry James, as a boy, goes with his father to have a daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady and is captured in a moment of self-consciousness about being American. Brady returns to photograph Walt Whitman and, later, at City Point in the midst of the Civil War, Ulysses S. 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. Mark Twain publishes Grant's memoirs; W.E.B. Du Bois and his professor William James visit the young Helen Keller; and Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz argue about photography. Later, Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein, who was also a student of William James's, attend a performance of The Rite of Spring; Hart Crane goes out on the town with Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston write a play together; Elizabeth Bishop takes Marianne Moore, who was photographed by both Van Vechten and Richard Avedon, to the circus; Avedon and James Baldwin collaborate on a book; John Cage and Marcel Duchamp play chess; and Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell march on the Pentagon in the anti-Vietnam War demonstration of 1967. The accumulation of these pairings draws thereader into the mysterious process through which creativity has been sparked and passed on among iconoclastic American writers and artists.

Ultimately, Rachel Cohen reveals a long chain of friendship, rebellion, and influence stretching from the moment just before the Civil War through a century that had a profound effect on our own time. Drawing on a decade of research, A Chance Meeting makes its own illuminating contribution to the tradition of which Cohen writes.

Enthralling... What is being divined is nothing less than a century or so of American taste, the nature of modern literary and artistic tangency in the United States... Rachel Cohen's vision of the life of art in her chosen century, and the effect of that vision upon her reader, is one of an astonishing gladness.

RICHARD HOWARD, FRONT PAGE REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Innovative...faultless... Cohen] gives us a more intimate sense of these people in a few pages than one sometimes gleans from entire biographies.

THE NEW YORKER

Rachel Cohen has created a masterpiece of variety and balance in her first book. A Chance Meeting takes 30 American writers and artists from Henry James to Robert Lowell, and braids them together in 36 encounters. Each person comes round two or three times, and every meeting, friendship and collaboration has a resonance that can be heard down the ages until what you have before you is an immense chain of artistic consequences.... And] beyond the anecdotage, and the characters and the circumstances, there begin to accrue some of the essential traits of American writing and American art... Fascinating.

THE ECONOMIST

Captivating...like an elaboratefugue... Cohen's] prose is elegant yet plain, and her judgments sound and generous... While carving a set of brilliant miniatures, Cohen is also indirectly telling a story of sex, race, political protest, and celebrity c

"Rachel Cohen has created a masterpiece of variety and balance in her first book.... Fascinating." The Economist

"These moments add up to a fresh if sidelong look at American letters, and to a work that culturally minded readers will greatly enjoy." Kirkus Reviews

"A wonderful, absorbing book in which information, anecdote, literary understanding and gossip take fire and are transformed into insight. Rachel Cohen's wit and learning, conjoined, are a marvel. The writing of A Chance Meeting, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, is at a rare level of grace. This is a book worth returning to, immensely distinguished and pleasurable." Robert Pinsky

"Cohen, in her book debut, provides an engrossing, if simplistic, cavalcade of American arts from the Civil War period through the 1960s." Publishers Weekly

"Dazzling... A book that's as addictive as popcorn, as guiltless as cruciferous vegetables....A Chance Meeting heralds an auspicious beginning to an already thrilling career." San Francisco Chronicle

"It can sometimes seem as if all American artists and writers are, and always have been, lone figures who go about their business without any contact with others of their kind. Rachel Cohen has written a lively and fascinating book that turns this idea on its head. Through the captivating device of what the French call 'the magic of the unlikely encounter,' she traces a tradition of meeting, sharing, and encouragement among individual writers, painters, and photographers that has enriched American arts and letters in ways that could never have been foreseen. Cohen offers the reader the gift of interconnected portraits, tightly drawn and cleverly told, then stands aside and allows the stories of these encounters — good as any fiction — to work their magic. Compelling and delightful." Thad Carhart, author of The Piano Shop on the Left Bank

"Enthralling...The 36 essays, as they progress...constitute something of a new genre... What is being divined is nothing less than a century or so of American taste." Richard Howard, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"As original and impressive a work of cultural history as I have encountered in years." Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer-prize winning author of Carry Me Home

"Innovative...faultless...[Cohen] gives us a more intimate sense of these people in a few pages than one sometimes gleans from entire biographies." The New Yorker

"Captivating...While carving a set of brilliant miniatures, Cohen is also indirectly telling a story of sex, race, political protest, and celebrity culture in America, from the Victorian era to the 1960s." The Boston Globe

"I can't think of any book that would give more raw pleasure to a book-reading person than A Chance Meeting. Our sense of the continuum of literary community is strengthened and shaded by these stories, which are told with a strange alchemy of grace, restraint, humor and passion." Dave Eggers

This unique American cultural history defines relationships among writers and artists who knew and influenced each other over the course of a century: 1854-1967.

Dedicates a chapter each to meaningful encounters between significant writers and artists, including Henry James and Matthew Brady, Willa Cather and Mark Twain, and Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

"They met in ordinary ways," writes Rachel Cohen in her introduction, "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."Each chapter of this inventive consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. In 1854, Henry James, as a boy, goes with his father to have a daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady and is captured in a moment of self-consciousness about being American. Brady returns to photograph Walt Whitman and, later, at City Point in the midst of the Civil War, Ulysses S. 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. Mark Twain publishes Grant's memoirs; W.E.B. Du Bois and his professor William James visit the young Helen Keller; and Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz argue about photography. Later, Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein, who was also a student of William James's, attend a performance of The Rite of Spring; Hart Crane goes out on the town with Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston write a play together; Elizabeth Bishop takes Marianne Moore, who was photographed by both Van Vechten and Richard Avedon, to the circus; Avedon and James Baldwin collaborate on a book; John Cage and Marcel Duchamp play chess; and Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell march on the Pentagon in the anti-Vietnam War demonstration of 1967. The accumulation of these pairings draws the reader into the mysterious process through which creativity has been sparked and passed on among iconoclastic American writers and artists.Ultimately, Rachel Cohen reveals a long chain of friendship, rebellion, and influence stretching from the moment just before the Civil War through a century that had a profound effect on our own time. Drawing on a decade of research, A Chance Meeting makes its own illuminating contribution to the tradition of which Cohen writes.

RACHEL COHEN grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and graduated from Harvard. She has written for The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, McSweeney’s, and other publications. Her essays appeared in Best American Essays 2003 and the 2003 Pushcart Anthology. Cohen has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and won the 2003 PEN/Jerard Fund Award for the manuscript of A Chance Meeting. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.

Henry James and Mathew Brady — William Dean Howells and Annie Adams Fields and Walt Whitman — Mathew Brady and Ulysses S. Grant — William Dean Howells and Henry James — Walt Whitman and Mathew Brady — Mark Twain and William Dean Howells — Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant — W.E.B. Du Bois and William James — Gertrude Stein and William James — Henry James and Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett — Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz — Willa Cather and Mark Twain — Willa Cather and Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett — Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz and Gertrude Stein — Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein — Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Steiglitz — Willa Cather and Edward Steichen and Katherine Anne Porter — Alfred Stieglitz and Hart Crane — Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin — Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston — Beauford Delaney and W.E.B. Du Bois — Hart Crane and Katherine Anne Porter — Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Morore — Zora Neale Hurston and Carl Van Vechten — Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp — Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin — Joseph Cornell and Marianne Moore — James Baldwin and Norman Mailer — Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop — John Cage and Richard Avedon — W.E.B. Du Bois and Charlie Chaplin — Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten and Richard Avedon — Richard Avedon and James Baldwin — Marianne Moore and Norman Mailer — John Cage and Marcel Duchamp — Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell.