American Characters : Selections from the National Portrait Gallery, Accompanied by Literary Portraits

by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis

• ISBN13: 9780300078954
• ISBN10: 0300078951
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 1999-08-11
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

This delightful book brings together 160 famous American figures from Pocahontas to Louis Armstrong, providing visual and verbal portraits that illuminate their place in American life. The portraiture -- painting, sculpture, photograph, or cartoon -- is paired with literary images taken from eyewitness accounts, memoirs, poems, letters, and biographies, and with lively and informative commentary by the editors, R. W. B. and Nancy Lewis. The whole is a rich addition to American cultural history.

The gallery of portraits includes statesmen and outlaws, artists and athletes, and writers and performers, all described by commentators who are equally colorful and illustrious. The book features, for example, John Guare on Eugene O'Neill, Al Capone on himself, Adlai Stevenson on Eleanor Roosevelt, Pete Seeger on Woody Guthrie, Stieglitz and O'Keeffe on each other, e. e. cummings on Buffalo Bill Cody, Arthur Ashe on Joe Louis, and Gertrude Stein on Ulysses S. Grant. Some of the verbal portraits were composed especially for this book, among them Harold Bloom on Joseph

Table of Contents

Cast of Characters	viii
Director's Foreword	xi
Alan Fern
Preface and Acknowledgments	xiii
Puritans and Colonials	1	(20)
The Early Republic: Citizens and Interpreters	21	(39)
American Renaissance: Science and Letters	60	(24)
The Civil War Years	84	(31)
American Indian Leaders	115	(20)
The Gilded Decades	135	(35)
Entering the Twentieth Century	170	(46)
Faces on the Public Scene: Through the 1920s	216	(18)
The Harlem Renaissance	234	(17)
The Champions	251	(20)
Writers and Artists: The Second Flowering	271	(50)
Faces on the Public Scene: The 1930s to the 1970s	321	(26)
Artists of Entertainment	347	(32)
Commentary	379	(26)
Index	405