What do you think?
Rate this book
A Chance Meeting : Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967
Each chapter of "A Chance Meeting" takes up an actual encounter between two historical figures. As Rachel Cohen writes in her 'They met in ordinary ways - 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.' "A Chance Meeting" opens with a young Henry James in the studio of the great Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, and captures the boy in a moment of exquisite self-consciousness about being American. Later in the book, Brady will return with Walt Whitman and with Ulysses Grant, while Henry James reappears with William Dean Howells and Sarah Orne Jewett. Cohen brilliantly reanimates such unforgettable pairings as Grant and Mark Twain; William James and W. E. B. Du Bois; Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz; Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein; Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston; Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore; Richard Avedon and James Baldwin; and John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. In all, thirty figures appear and reappear to create a long chain of friendships. Ultimately, Cohen traces the 'huge and altering loyalties' that emerged, the 'permanent conditions of influence' that were established, and the 'acts of rebellion' that were sparked in pursuit of a defiantly American form of expression. "A Chance Meeting" is enchanting, exciting, evocative - and just so well done that it will become a classic.
388 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
25 people are currently reading
900 people want to read
About the author
Rachel Cohen
36 books12 followersRachel Cohen has written essays for The New Yorker, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, Apollo, The New York Times, The Nation, The Threepenny Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s and other publications, and her essays have been anthologized in Best American Essays and in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her third book, Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels was published by FSG in July 2020 to critical acclaim. Austen Years is a meditation on reading, having children, the death of her father, five novels by Jane Austen, and reading again in times of isolation and transformation.
Cohen's first book, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, (Random House, 2004) is a series of thirty-six linked essays about the encounters among thirty figures in American history during the long century from the civil war through the civil rights movement; it won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and was named a notable book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and by Maureen Corrigan on National Public Radio. Her second book, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, (Yale University Press, 2013) investigates the development of a great art connoisseur who began life as a penniless Lithuanian immigrant and made his career in the world of Gilded Age finance and prejudice. It was longlisted for the JQ Wingate prize and an excerpt from it appeared in the New Yorker under the title "Priceless."
Cohen has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago, and lives in Chicago.
Cohen's first book, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, (Random House, 2004) is a series of thirty-six linked essays about the encounters among thirty figures in American history during the long century from the civil war through the civil rights movement; it won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and was named a notable book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and by Maureen Corrigan on National Public Radio. Her second book, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, (Yale University Press, 2013) investigates the development of a great art connoisseur who began life as a penniless Lithuanian immigrant and made his career in the world of Gilded Age finance and prejudice. It was longlisted for the JQ Wingate prize and an excerpt from it appeared in the New Yorker under the title "Priceless."
Cohen has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago, and lives in Chicago.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
March 18, 2013
I admit, I skipped around. Still I've read most of it and the writing is so elegant, the encounters so well-told that I feel confident assigning four stars. Encounters between James Baldwin and Richard Avedon; Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell; Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett, and many other American artists and writers.
Here is Rachel Cohen on Bishop and Lowell:
"Lowell was someone who consumed, who had no boundaries at all, who made epics, who put everything in. Bishop selected, she made discrete things; as befitted a geographer, she had a clear sense of boundaries. He thought the best you could be was inclusive; she thought the best you could be was exact."
And Sarah Orne Jewett in a letter to the young Willa Cather:
...You must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society....In short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality--you can write about life, but never life itself....To work in silence with all one's heart, that is the writer's lot; he is the only artist who must be a solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the world.
Here is Rachel Cohen on Bishop and Lowell:
"Lowell was someone who consumed, who had no boundaries at all, who made epics, who put everything in. Bishop selected, she made discrete things; as befitted a geographer, she had a clear sense of boundaries. He thought the best you could be was inclusive; she thought the best you could be was exact."
And Sarah Orne Jewett in a letter to the young Willa Cather:
...You must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society....In short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality--you can write about life, but never life itself....To work in silence with all one's heart, that is the writer's lot; he is the only artist who must be a solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the world.
October 8, 2017
Incontri tra poeti, artisti e scrittori Americani del Novecento e di fine Ottocento. Pagine molto interessanti, in particolare quelle dedicate a Marianne Moore, Elizabet Bishop, Joseph Cornell
"Joseph Cornell era un archivista visionario. Il suo lavoro consisteva nel raccogliere e sovrapporre pezzi di carta e tappi, sagome di pappagalli e mappe astrologiche, bottiglie di vetro e bussole. Viveva a Flushing, nel Queens, con sua madre e il fratello Robert, la cui paralisi cerebrale richiedeva cure continue".
"Una volta fu arrestato a causa di un equivoco: era rimasto ad osservare per ore ed ore, dall'altra parte del marciapiede, una ragazza che vendeva biglietti in un botteghino illuminato all'esterno di un cinema. Finché lei aveva cominciato a preoccuparsi e aveva chiamato la polizia".
"Cornell e Marianne Moore erano due solitari. Le lettere che si scambiarono erano molto romantiche, ricche di allusioni leggere, che entrambi gradivano. Ma forse si sarebbero divertiti di più se almeno uno dei due fosse stato un po' più esplicito".
"Joseph Cornell era un archivista visionario. Il suo lavoro consisteva nel raccogliere e sovrapporre pezzi di carta e tappi, sagome di pappagalli e mappe astrologiche, bottiglie di vetro e bussole. Viveva a Flushing, nel Queens, con sua madre e il fratello Robert, la cui paralisi cerebrale richiedeva cure continue".
"Una volta fu arrestato a causa di un equivoco: era rimasto ad osservare per ore ed ore, dall'altra parte del marciapiede, una ragazza che vendeva biglietti in un botteghino illuminato all'esterno di un cinema. Finché lei aveva cominciato a preoccuparsi e aveva chiamato la polizia".
"Cornell e Marianne Moore erano due solitari. Le lettere che si scambiarono erano molto romantiche, ricche di allusioni leggere, che entrambi gradivano. Ma forse si sarebbero divertiti di più se almeno uno dei due fosse stato un po' più esplicito".
December 28, 2019
Wow. This is one of my best reads for 2019 for sure. The format itself is unique and creative; just take a look at the handwritten "map" of encounters on the book's endpapers. Cohen has connected a universe of American artists, writers, and creators through their chance meetings, dinner dates, parties, visits to galleries, and -- most amazing of all, their written letters. Henry James and Mark Twain exchanged over 400 letters during their friendship. Elizabeth Bishop and her companion would spend entire days reading at their home in Brazil. Marianne Moore went to a prize fight with George Plimpton. This clever and elegant book is a kaleidoscope of American arts and letters, and it's so fascinating to see how these lives overlapped and influenced on another. This collection of essays also does a tremendous job of bringing important LGBT lives into the light. I loved getting to know James Baldwin this way and Carl Van Vechten. If you love American arts and culture and want to see American history in a new way, take a trip through these 36 connected essays.
April 15, 2010
A book about random encounters betweens American artists and writers during the past 150 years... Strangely, I met the author of this book while traveling on the Bolt bus between Boston and New York. We talked the entire ride about our experiences as writers, teachers, humans... Haven't seen Ms. Cohen since, but her book is certainly captivating from the very first chapter. Looking forward to this one.
December 18, 2009
This review originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News:
Mosaic. Collage. Tapestry. Snapshots in an album. . . . I suspect that I'm not the only reader who'll be tempted to search for a metaphor to sum up what Rachel Cohen is doing in this remarkable book. But none of those quite captures her achievement: a portrait of American artistic and literary culture from the mid-19th century to the late-middle 20th.
Not a complete portrait, of course. All sorts of important figures -- Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Georgia O'Keeffe, Dorothea Lange, Jackson Pollock, to name a random few -- are either missing or can only be glimpsed moving through the background of this portrait. Cohen's focus is on the friendships and relationships that link a handful of people, on the fertilizing encounters that sparked ideas and images and transmitted them down the years, from the day in 1854 when 11-year-old Henry James had his picture taken by Mathew Brady to the day in 1967 when Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell marched together against the war in Vietnam.
There is much unabashed fictionalizing in this book. We are told that the artist Beauford Delaney, on his way to meet W.C. Handy, ''paused for a minute to admire the reflections in the windows of the store at the corner of Thompson and Bleecker -- the plate glass doubled the fruit for sale and the fire hydrant -- and then he went on.'' And we are shown William Dean Howells, ''pacing the rug in his library'' and reflecting on a conversation with James: ''Though it was winter and they had meant just to take a turn through the Cambridge streets, they had found themselves walking, as they often did, out as far as Fresh Pond.''
But in the source notes at the end of the book, Cohen admits that she doesn't know whether Howells and James walked as far as Fresh Pond on that occasion, that ''Delaney's walk through Washington Square is a route he often took,'' and that she has added ''details of atmosphere'' to some encounters, fiddled with chronology and otherwise speculated about particulars. This may sound like novelizing fakery, but Cohen pulls it off -- and she does it very much in the spirit of some of her subjects, such as Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein, both of whom embroidered upon their stories about sitting in the same box at Stravinsky's ''The Rite of Spring.''
Van Vechten had been a dinner guest at 27, rue de Fleurus, the home of Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and they had agreed to go together to the second performance of the ballet, which had become the hottest ticket in Paris after the riotous premiere. But when Stein told the story in ''The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,'' Van Vechten was a mysterious stranger sharing a box with them at the ballet. And in his published account, not only were the women who shared a box with him strangers, they were attending the first performance. When Stein praised his account, he acknowledged that it had been the second performance and added, with a flourish of Wildean paradox, that ''one must only be accurate about such details in a work of fiction.''
Even the title of Cohen's book sacrifices accuracy to poetry: Few of the meetings in ''A Chance Meeting'' are truly chance ones, and many chapters deal with significant meetings between old acquaintances. One chapter is about how Willa Cather and Katherine Anne Porter didn't meet, though we also learn in this chapter where Cohen got the title for her book: Cather wrote an essay called ''A Chance Meeting,'' about ''encountering Flaubert's niece at a hotel in Provence.''
But I doubt that even the sternest readers, once they dip into this biographical treasury, will quibble about Cohen's colorizing of facts. For these are like fine short stories whose characters happen to be real and whose events actually took place -- even if not precisely in the manner Cohen speculates they did. The book is a chain of epiphanies -- moments when egos flashed and flared, when one generation passed a gift to the next.
So, to trace one thread through the book, we begin with the very young James, exquisitely self-conscious as always -- this time about being photographed wearing a jacket that had amused William Makepeace Thackeray because of its extraordinary number of buttons. In a later chapter, James is visited by Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, whose ''Boston marriage'' (as long-term relationships between two women were then called) resembled the one in his novel ''The Bostonians'' that was based on the relationship of James' sister, Alice, and her companion, Katharine Loring.
Two chapters later, Cather is visiting Fields (Jewett has died) and they are waiting for a visit from James, who sends a note to say that the weather is too hot for him to visit. (Cohen speculates that a visit from James might actually have sent Cather into a ''decade of disappointment and artistic wandering'' -- she might have been too influenced by him to find her own way.)
Then Cather has her photograph taken by Edward Steichen, and the photograph inspires Katherine Anne Porter to write an essay about Cather, whom she never met, though she could have in 1922, when she lived only a few blocks away from Cather in Greenwich Village. But Porter did meet Hart Crane, who met Charlie Chaplin, who was visited in Switzerland by W.E.B. Du Bois, who was sketched by Delaney, who was a father figure to James Baldwin, who quarreled with Mailer, who marched with Lowell in Washington.
On the endpapers, Cohen has even diagramed a spiderweb of connections among the 30 people she writes about, which may suggest that her book is little more than an elegant working out of the six-degrees-of-separation theory -- how to get from James to Lowell, or from Mark Twain to John Cage. (It's fun to think about what Twain might have written about the Cage piece in which a pianist sits at the instrument and doesn't play it for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds.) And since Mailer appeared in ''Ragtime'' with Elizabeth McGovern, who appeared in ''She's Having a Baby'' with Kevin Bacon, I suppose you could use this book to play that game, too.
But that reduces the richness of insight and abundance of wit in this book to an absurdity. For its focus on intimate moments in artists' lives illuminates, among other things, the role that sexuality and race have played in American culture. It's no accident, I'm sure, that so many of the people Cohen has chosen to write about -- from James to Baldwin, from Walt Whitman to Elizabeth Bishop -- were (or may be reasonably assumed to have been) gay. And it's refreshing to see black artists treated as part of the fabric of our culture, and not as figures in discrete ''movements.''
Cohen, who teaches non-fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence, has a fine, economical way of capturing people in a few phrases. For example: ''Something in the way Cather held her shoulders and the way she observed a crowd gave people to know that she came from a place where the wind blew a little cleaner, and, even in a hot and crowded room, she carried some sense of its distant freshness.'' And: ''People very often sent things to Marianne Moore in the hopes of getting back the language with which to talk about them.''
She can encapsulate an essential fact with a devastating poignancy: ''Du Bois had a special feeling for Langston Hughes, who was three years older than his own son would have been if it had been conceivable for a white doctor to treat a black child in the middle of the night in Georgia in 1899 and the Du Boises' son had lived.'' Or wryly note of Porter, the one person in the book whom Cohen seems truly to dislike, that in Germany ''she seems to have been going to dinner parties with Hermann Goering, a predilection she would later frame as information gathering.'' She even tosses off enchanting bits of trivia: Did you know that Crane's father invented Life Savers candy?
Cohen's prose is so eloquent, so pointed and mellifluous, that her book almost doesn't need illustrating. But it is, with photographs by Brady and Van Vechten and Steichen, by Alfred Stieglitz and Richard Avedon, that enhance our sense of being present at the moments that Cohen has so keenly captured inthis extraordinary book.
Mosaic. Collage. Tapestry. Snapshots in an album. . . . I suspect that I'm not the only reader who'll be tempted to search for a metaphor to sum up what Rachel Cohen is doing in this remarkable book. But none of those quite captures her achievement: a portrait of American artistic and literary culture from the mid-19th century to the late-middle 20th.
Not a complete portrait, of course. All sorts of important figures -- Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Georgia O'Keeffe, Dorothea Lange, Jackson Pollock, to name a random few -- are either missing or can only be glimpsed moving through the background of this portrait. Cohen's focus is on the friendships and relationships that link a handful of people, on the fertilizing encounters that sparked ideas and images and transmitted them down the years, from the day in 1854 when 11-year-old Henry James had his picture taken by Mathew Brady to the day in 1967 when Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell marched together against the war in Vietnam.
There is much unabashed fictionalizing in this book. We are told that the artist Beauford Delaney, on his way to meet W.C. Handy, ''paused for a minute to admire the reflections in the windows of the store at the corner of Thompson and Bleecker -- the plate glass doubled the fruit for sale and the fire hydrant -- and then he went on.'' And we are shown William Dean Howells, ''pacing the rug in his library'' and reflecting on a conversation with James: ''Though it was winter and they had meant just to take a turn through the Cambridge streets, they had found themselves walking, as they often did, out as far as Fresh Pond.''
But in the source notes at the end of the book, Cohen admits that she doesn't know whether Howells and James walked as far as Fresh Pond on that occasion, that ''Delaney's walk through Washington Square is a route he often took,'' and that she has added ''details of atmosphere'' to some encounters, fiddled with chronology and otherwise speculated about particulars. This may sound like novelizing fakery, but Cohen pulls it off -- and she does it very much in the spirit of some of her subjects, such as Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein, both of whom embroidered upon their stories about sitting in the same box at Stravinsky's ''The Rite of Spring.''
Van Vechten had been a dinner guest at 27, rue de Fleurus, the home of Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and they had agreed to go together to the second performance of the ballet, which had become the hottest ticket in Paris after the riotous premiere. But when Stein told the story in ''The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,'' Van Vechten was a mysterious stranger sharing a box with them at the ballet. And in his published account, not only were the women who shared a box with him strangers, they were attending the first performance. When Stein praised his account, he acknowledged that it had been the second performance and added, with a flourish of Wildean paradox, that ''one must only be accurate about such details in a work of fiction.''
Even the title of Cohen's book sacrifices accuracy to poetry: Few of the meetings in ''A Chance Meeting'' are truly chance ones, and many chapters deal with significant meetings between old acquaintances. One chapter is about how Willa Cather and Katherine Anne Porter didn't meet, though we also learn in this chapter where Cohen got the title for her book: Cather wrote an essay called ''A Chance Meeting,'' about ''encountering Flaubert's niece at a hotel in Provence.''
But I doubt that even the sternest readers, once they dip into this biographical treasury, will quibble about Cohen's colorizing of facts. For these are like fine short stories whose characters happen to be real and whose events actually took place -- even if not precisely in the manner Cohen speculates they did. The book is a chain of epiphanies -- moments when egos flashed and flared, when one generation passed a gift to the next.
So, to trace one thread through the book, we begin with the very young James, exquisitely self-conscious as always -- this time about being photographed wearing a jacket that had amused William Makepeace Thackeray because of its extraordinary number of buttons. In a later chapter, James is visited by Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, whose ''Boston marriage'' (as long-term relationships between two women were then called) resembled the one in his novel ''The Bostonians'' that was based on the relationship of James' sister, Alice, and her companion, Katharine Loring.
Two chapters later, Cather is visiting Fields (Jewett has died) and they are waiting for a visit from James, who sends a note to say that the weather is too hot for him to visit. (Cohen speculates that a visit from James might actually have sent Cather into a ''decade of disappointment and artistic wandering'' -- she might have been too influenced by him to find her own way.)
Then Cather has her photograph taken by Edward Steichen, and the photograph inspires Katherine Anne Porter to write an essay about Cather, whom she never met, though she could have in 1922, when she lived only a few blocks away from Cather in Greenwich Village. But Porter did meet Hart Crane, who met Charlie Chaplin, who was visited in Switzerland by W.E.B. Du Bois, who was sketched by Delaney, who was a father figure to James Baldwin, who quarreled with Mailer, who marched with Lowell in Washington.
On the endpapers, Cohen has even diagramed a spiderweb of connections among the 30 people she writes about, which may suggest that her book is little more than an elegant working out of the six-degrees-of-separation theory -- how to get from James to Lowell, or from Mark Twain to John Cage. (It's fun to think about what Twain might have written about the Cage piece in which a pianist sits at the instrument and doesn't play it for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds.) And since Mailer appeared in ''Ragtime'' with Elizabeth McGovern, who appeared in ''She's Having a Baby'' with Kevin Bacon, I suppose you could use this book to play that game, too.
But that reduces the richness of insight and abundance of wit in this book to an absurdity. For its focus on intimate moments in artists' lives illuminates, among other things, the role that sexuality and race have played in American culture. It's no accident, I'm sure, that so many of the people Cohen has chosen to write about -- from James to Baldwin, from Walt Whitman to Elizabeth Bishop -- were (or may be reasonably assumed to have been) gay. And it's refreshing to see black artists treated as part of the fabric of our culture, and not as figures in discrete ''movements.''
Cohen, who teaches non-fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence, has a fine, economical way of capturing people in a few phrases. For example: ''Something in the way Cather held her shoulders and the way she observed a crowd gave people to know that she came from a place where the wind blew a little cleaner, and, even in a hot and crowded room, she carried some sense of its distant freshness.'' And: ''People very often sent things to Marianne Moore in the hopes of getting back the language with which to talk about them.''
She can encapsulate an essential fact with a devastating poignancy: ''Du Bois had a special feeling for Langston Hughes, who was three years older than his own son would have been if it had been conceivable for a white doctor to treat a black child in the middle of the night in Georgia in 1899 and the Du Boises' son had lived.'' Or wryly note of Porter, the one person in the book whom Cohen seems truly to dislike, that in Germany ''she seems to have been going to dinner parties with Hermann Goering, a predilection she would later frame as information gathering.'' She even tosses off enchanting bits of trivia: Did you know that Crane's father invented Life Savers candy?
Cohen's prose is so eloquent, so pointed and mellifluous, that her book almost doesn't need illustrating. But it is, with photographs by Brady and Van Vechten and Steichen, by Alfred Stieglitz and Richard Avedon, that enhance our sense of being present at the moments that Cohen has so keenly captured inthis extraordinary book.
June 27, 2024
Delightful and thoughtful read. Cohen uses dual portraits of countless American artists to tell the history of what it has meant to be an American artist. Through the interweaving narratives she manages to find the connections between the Civil War photography of Matthew Brady all and the experimental music of John Cage. While some portraits here feel a bit less detailed than others, all of them utilize personal histories of these great artists to tell a broader story. I'm especially impressed by its fluidity as I was expecting it to feel more like a variety of separate essays, but due to Cohen's intertwining narratives it actually has quite a bit of momentum.
I come away with this learning a lot about specific cultural histories I was ignorant to and really wanting to read Henry James.
I come away with this learning a lot about specific cultural histories I was ignorant to and really wanting to read Henry James.
Want to read
May 10, 2024Reissue. First published 2004, and somewhat fictionalized. Worth a shot.
October 29, 2025
Excellently researched, each vignette is a lovely story of some of my favorite American authors of the 19th and 20th centuries. How they influenced one another and had the same kind of influence back-and-forth with artists. Reading this book made that time period really come alive.
August 2, 2024
This is an amazing book. It is a series of 36 encounters between 2 or 3 influential people in American life between the Civil War and the Vietnam War. The characters sometimes appear in several different encounters. It is a dense and it made me realize there was so much more I should know about many of these people. Cohen uses a multitude of original sources to bring these encounters to life. I was surprised by the importance to photo portraits and the portrayals of the photographers were fascinating. For example, in the first encounter, a young Henry James has his portrait taken by the photographer Matthew Brady; later we meet Brady depicting General Grant on the battlefield and photographing Walt Whitman. The narrative leaps back and forth connecting such people as Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Beauford Delaney, James Baldwin, and RIchard Avedon. Over and over again I was struck by the magic of these interactions and how much they influenced the lives involved. If you read it straight through you might be a bit overwhelmed. However, I did and was amazed at how much I was able to recall.
April 8, 2020
I started this two different times in the years it’s been on my bookshelves. Not sure why I stopped other than the fact that it is book crammed full of information, stories, musings, reflections by the author and her subjects on art and literature. Beautiful writing and a brilliant concept. A slow read but endlessly satisfying at every turn. The book opens with the very young Henry James having his photo taken, along with his father, by Mathew Brady in NYC in 1854 and ends with Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell at the March on the Pentagon. In-between we meet Whitman, US Grant, Twain, Steichen, Steiglitz, Stein. Everyone to-ing and fro-ing in the most amazing dances across the years.
March 30, 2008
This is what I'd call speculative non-fiction. Rachel Cohen researched many of the literary and artistic luminaries and their encounters with each other. She then writes short vignettes of what those encounters might have been like. For instance, Willa Cather meeting Mark Twain or James Baldwin meeting Norman Mailer. It's cool.
December 10, 2008
Brilliant collection of intertwined vignettes of the lives of artists and writers, from the Civil War to the mid 20th century. Highly recommended for anyone interested in cultural history
November 16, 2025
I read this in 2004 when it came out. I read it too quickly. At the time I realized that I missed a good bit of the cleverness and wisdom by rushing through it. The NYRB Press recently rereleased it in a handsome paperback. That seemed like the occasion to reread. I am glad I did.
The book is built on a very clever premise. Cohen describes 36 occasions where two American novelists, poets, painters, or photographers meet. The meetings are arranged chronologically, starting with Henry James, as an 11-year-old meeting the photographer Matthew Brady in 1854 and ending with Norman Mailer meeting the poet Robert Lowell at the march on the Pentagon in 1967. The stories are all intertwined. For example, William Dean Howell meets a young Mark Twain, and an old Mark Twain meets a young Willa Cather.
Cohen is an elegant writer with a light touch. She mentions the theory that Twain never wrote a second great novel because he was distracted by his money problems, but she concludes, "though, perhaps, no one has two "Huckelberry Finns" to write."
She is also very good at gathering good lines and stories from her subjects. When Henry James as asked to describe his vision of heaven said that "he imagined it would look a great deal like Harvard Yard."
James Baldwin was standing on a Paris street with the painter Beauford Delaney. Delaney told him to look down. "Delaney asked him what he saw and Baldwin said a puddle. Delaney said, "look again" and then Baldwin saw the reflection of the buildings distorted and radiant in the oil in the puddle". Delaney said, "what you cannot or will not see, says something about you."
The pairings are fascinating. The poets Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore become lifelong friends after a first meeting. The story of their friendship is moving. Norman Mailer and James Baldwin were like two fighting roosters almost every time they met.
She surprised me with a comparison of siblings. She compares William and Henry James' relationship with the relationship between Gertude Stern and Leo Stern. It is a very smart piece of writing.
Henry James weaves through the whole book. She starts with him getting his picture taken as a boy by Brady. He is wearing a coat with many buttons. Cohen makes a very good argument that Willa Cather was lucky that she never met Henry James because he might have steered her away from her great American style. She shows James Baldwin studying James' stories in London, which did probably contribute to Baldwin at times over done style. Then she cleverly calls back to the buttons on Henry James childhood jacket when Marianne Moore tells the story to Elizabeth Bishop.
These are personal semi-fictional stories by Cohen. She imagines the details of the meetings based on her reading. It is essential to read her notes at the end of the book. She explains her thought process for each chapter. (My criticism is that the note should be at the end of each chapter.) It is clear that she admires some of her subjects, like Willa Cather and Beauford Delaney, and that she is not a fond of some of them like Katherine Anne Porter and Hart Crane.
This is a great book to savor as you read.
(One mystery is her comment that Carl Van Vechten was "the first man in New York to wear a wristwatch in public." How did she know that? What is the significance? Was there some reason men hadn't previously worn wristwatches in public? An inquiring public wants to know.)
The book is built on a very clever premise. Cohen describes 36 occasions where two American novelists, poets, painters, or photographers meet. The meetings are arranged chronologically, starting with Henry James, as an 11-year-old meeting the photographer Matthew Brady in 1854 and ending with Norman Mailer meeting the poet Robert Lowell at the march on the Pentagon in 1967. The stories are all intertwined. For example, William Dean Howell meets a young Mark Twain, and an old Mark Twain meets a young Willa Cather.
Cohen is an elegant writer with a light touch. She mentions the theory that Twain never wrote a second great novel because he was distracted by his money problems, but she concludes, "though, perhaps, no one has two "Huckelberry Finns" to write."
She is also very good at gathering good lines and stories from her subjects. When Henry James as asked to describe his vision of heaven said that "he imagined it would look a great deal like Harvard Yard."
James Baldwin was standing on a Paris street with the painter Beauford Delaney. Delaney told him to look down. "Delaney asked him what he saw and Baldwin said a puddle. Delaney said, "look again" and then Baldwin saw the reflection of the buildings distorted and radiant in the oil in the puddle". Delaney said, "what you cannot or will not see, says something about you."
The pairings are fascinating. The poets Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore become lifelong friends after a first meeting. The story of their friendship is moving. Norman Mailer and James Baldwin were like two fighting roosters almost every time they met.
She surprised me with a comparison of siblings. She compares William and Henry James' relationship with the relationship between Gertude Stern and Leo Stern. It is a very smart piece of writing.
Henry James weaves through the whole book. She starts with him getting his picture taken as a boy by Brady. He is wearing a coat with many buttons. Cohen makes a very good argument that Willa Cather was lucky that she never met Henry James because he might have steered her away from her great American style. She shows James Baldwin studying James' stories in London, which did probably contribute to Baldwin at times over done style. Then she cleverly calls back to the buttons on Henry James childhood jacket when Marianne Moore tells the story to Elizabeth Bishop.
These are personal semi-fictional stories by Cohen. She imagines the details of the meetings based on her reading. It is essential to read her notes at the end of the book. She explains her thought process for each chapter. (My criticism is that the note should be at the end of each chapter.) It is clear that she admires some of her subjects, like Willa Cather and Beauford Delaney, and that she is not a fond of some of them like Katherine Anne Porter and Hart Crane.
This is a great book to savor as you read.
(One mystery is her comment that Carl Van Vechten was "the first man in New York to wear a wristwatch in public." How did she know that? What is the significance? Was there some reason men hadn't previously worn wristwatches in public? An inquiring public wants to know.)
September 22, 2025
A BRILLIANT BUT hard-to-describe book. The original subtitle of 2004 does a better job of suggesting the book's project than that of the 2024 NYRB reprint I read: "Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967." We have something like a group biography (Leon Edel's Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men), but not exactly, because we are talking about a much longer stretch of time (over a century) and the figures do not constitute a movement or a group.
What we get are thirty-six chapters, each what Cohen calls a "double portrait," each presenting an occasion when one well known American writer (or photographer, or composer, or painter) met another: "intertwined lives," as the original subtitle had it. We have chapters, for example, on Gertrude Stein and William James (she studied with him at Harvard), on Mark Twain and Willa Cather (she got to go to his 70th birthday party, which was quite a big bash), on Joseph Cornell and Marianne Moore (two deeply idiosyncratic artists who got along famously). Some meeting were fortuitous and never repeated (Matthew Brady photographed the eleven-year-old Henry James and his father), some became collaborations (Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes) or lasting friendships (Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore), some went badly, badly wrong (Katherine Anne Porter and Hart Crane).
The book does not have a thesis, exactly. It does not seem to be making an argument. But you nonetheless seem to be watching a kind of tapestry being woven, or a kind of fantastically ornate braiding, the cultural life of a country coming into being as the practitioners of one art or another cross paths, acknowledge each other, strike sparks, and return to their paths. Something, the reader feels, is being intangibly communicated among all of them and passed on from one generation to the next, mysteriously making things cohere.
Not everyone who might be here is here--no Dickinson, no Fitzgerald, no Hemingway--and the figures chosen are mainly people who mostly lived and worked close to New York City. Somehow, the field we are looking out upon still feels broad, even representative.
The time Cohen invested in this book must have been immense, but all her research is carried lightly, and the prose is as swift as a running brook. A Chance Meeting is one of a kind and a delight.
What we get are thirty-six chapters, each what Cohen calls a "double portrait," each presenting an occasion when one well known American writer (or photographer, or composer, or painter) met another: "intertwined lives," as the original subtitle had it. We have chapters, for example, on Gertrude Stein and William James (she studied with him at Harvard), on Mark Twain and Willa Cather (she got to go to his 70th birthday party, which was quite a big bash), on Joseph Cornell and Marianne Moore (two deeply idiosyncratic artists who got along famously). Some meeting were fortuitous and never repeated (Matthew Brady photographed the eleven-year-old Henry James and his father), some became collaborations (Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes) or lasting friendships (Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore), some went badly, badly wrong (Katherine Anne Porter and Hart Crane).
The book does not have a thesis, exactly. It does not seem to be making an argument. But you nonetheless seem to be watching a kind of tapestry being woven, or a kind of fantastically ornate braiding, the cultural life of a country coming into being as the practitioners of one art or another cross paths, acknowledge each other, strike sparks, and return to their paths. Something, the reader feels, is being intangibly communicated among all of them and passed on from one generation to the next, mysteriously making things cohere.
Not everyone who might be here is here--no Dickinson, no Fitzgerald, no Hemingway--and the figures chosen are mainly people who mostly lived and worked close to New York City. Somehow, the field we are looking out upon still feels broad, even representative.
The time Cohen invested in this book must have been immense, but all her research is carried lightly, and the prose is as swift as a running brook. A Chance Meeting is one of a kind and a delight.
October 27, 2024
A blend of nonfiction with imagined details, each chapter recounts a first meeting of literary/artistic illuminati, often with prequel and sequel narrative. I was drawn by the similarity to Edward and Nancy Caldwell Sorel’s series First Encounters, the basis of two operas created by my spouse and myself.
I’m sure there is operatic material here, as well. I especially enjoyed the first chapters with characters like Henry and William James, Matthew Brady, William Dean Howells, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Ulysses S. Grant and Willa Cather. After a turn toward modernists Gertrude Stein, Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz, the book explores Harlem Renaissance figures Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Beauford Delaney, the older luminary W.E.B. Du Bois, and the young luminary James Baldwin. So far, so very good! I knew little about these, and learned something new.
I found a falling-off in the overall stature and significance of the characters as we reached Hart Crane, Katherine Anne Porter, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer, but maybe I just don’t know enough to appreciate these figures. I always felt John Cage’s signature achievement was to appropriate elements of Dadaism and create an aesthetic that effectively placed him beyond criticism. Nothing here prompted me to seek more in his work, though it is of course interesting that he took lessons in chess from Marcel Duchamp!
I’m sure there is operatic material here, as well. I especially enjoyed the first chapters with characters like Henry and William James, Matthew Brady, William Dean Howells, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Ulysses S. Grant and Willa Cather. After a turn toward modernists Gertrude Stein, Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz, the book explores Harlem Renaissance figures Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Beauford Delaney, the older luminary W.E.B. Du Bois, and the young luminary James Baldwin. So far, so very good! I knew little about these, and learned something new.
I found a falling-off in the overall stature and significance of the characters as we reached Hart Crane, Katherine Anne Porter, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer, but maybe I just don’t know enough to appreciate these figures. I always felt John Cage’s signature achievement was to appropriate elements of Dadaism and create an aesthetic that effectively placed him beyond criticism. Nothing here prompted me to seek more in his work, though it is of course interesting that he took lessons in chess from Marcel Duchamp!
August 1, 2024
Delightful short-chapter dual biographies of famous American writers, artists, and photographers of the 19th and early 20th century. For literary readers, this is candy. The title refers to how significant friendships and mentorships were formed by chance meetings and the influence that each artist had on the other. The book opens with a piece about the 8-year old Henry James and his father came to New York to have their picture taken by Matthew Brady and how that picture became significant in James's life. It would have never occurred to me that there would be a line between Henry James and Matthew Brady, but that's the wonderful thing about this book, it opens up connections that you'd never imagine. I heard Rachel Cohen interviewed in Princeton when the new edition came out (this is the 20th anniversary edition) several months ago and was hooked. This is a book to be read in short bursts, because you'll have plenty to think about after each chapter.
September 27, 2024
With exquisite research and an engaging concept, Cohen traces the artistic and literary connections of the American intellectual scene from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. From Henry James to James Baldwin, Walt Whitman to Marianne Moore, Matthew Brady to Richard Avedon, the authors and artists circle each other, approximate each other, have all out relationships, or just admire each other. Somehow, it give me great delight to know that Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin caroused one night, that Gertrude Stein studied psychology with William James and that John Cage played chess with Marcel Duchamp. I am a better, more informed person for having read this. Definitely do the same!
April 17, 2024
This is quite a book. Linking folks across time and generations, not to mention their personal encounters with each other. Her map, at the start of the book, tells the reader it's going to be an interesting, complicated ride.
Cohen brought each of the individuals to life beyond the book blurbs or biographical bits I'd read before aboit them. Of particular interest to me was Harlem. Lots of personalities woven together there. Some I recognized, others became new acquaintances. The wrap up around the Vietnam era and the concerns of splintering the country are so similar to the rhetoric today. Must be a great fear that is now culturally felt.
I'm glad this has been reissued.
Cohen brought each of the individuals to life beyond the book blurbs or biographical bits I'd read before aboit them. Of particular interest to me was Harlem. Lots of personalities woven together there. Some I recognized, others became new acquaintances. The wrap up around the Vietnam era and the concerns of splintering the country are so similar to the rhetoric today. Must be a great fear that is now culturally felt.
I'm glad this has been reissued.
June 3, 2024
This is a series of biographical essays featuring at least two figures from 19th or 20th century American culture meeting up. Either they are doing something together (for instance, various people posing for photographs by Edward Steichen or Richard Avedon), but not always with a purpose in mind. Most of the cultural figures that Cohen profiles are writers—novelists, poets or journalists. Because Cohan has read a lot more than me, I was introduced here to a variety of writers who I subsequently read books by, including Zora Neale Hurston and Willa Cather. Before I finished Cohen’s book, I had finished three by Hurston and Cather. In short, Cohen expanded my mind, and I am grateful.
June 24, 2024
I was not ready for this book when it first appeared in 2004. I was mesmerized by this intertwined group biography which moves across time and space without jolting readers. Cohen weaves the threads and the contextual background with neither seams nor knots showing. I thought I would only read the chapters about authors and editors with which I'm familiar (Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mark Twain, Henry James, etc.). But I was so engaged that I moved forward in time to learn about many others, previously familiar in name only, or not at all.
I'm adding this volume to my biography shelf as an exemplar of what to do while writing. I understand now why there's a 20th anniversary edition!
I'm adding this volume to my biography shelf as an exemplar of what to do while writing. I understand now why there's a 20th anniversary edition!
March 13, 2024
Cohen's interlocked essays about various artists from the period just prior to the start of the Civil War to after WWII is quite good. Her analysis is good and her wording engaging. I love the essay about Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes.
It is interesting to see how people talk about Chaplin and his exile from the US. It's true that the attack on Chaplin because of his relationship with teen girls was basically because of Chaplin's politics. But it is also interesting that a sixteen year girl is referred to as a young woman and not a girl.
It is interesting to see how people talk about Chaplin and his exile from the US. It's true that the attack on Chaplin because of his relationship with teen girls was basically because of Chaplin's politics. But it is also interesting that a sixteen year girl is referred to as a young woman and not a girl.
July 22, 2025
Check this book out!!! The concept for this book is that every chapter is a short essay on a relationship of some kind between two famous artists and then the next chapter is about one of those two artists and another person with whom they had a connection and it builds and builds and builds over time… genius!
In one chapter, Carl Van Vechten writes to Gertrude Stein, “Thornton Wilder has got me down bad with jealousy. Don’t go and like him BETTER, PLEASE…! Don’t you go calling TW a Woojums! I will bite him!…”
Is that not how we all feel towards those we love… we just want a BITE!
In one chapter, Carl Van Vechten writes to Gertrude Stein, “Thornton Wilder has got me down bad with jealousy. Don’t go and like him BETTER, PLEASE…! Don’t you go calling TW a Woojums! I will bite him!…”
Is that not how we all feel towards those we love… we just want a BITE!
July 15, 2024
A series of short biographical essays that focus on artists meeting and on American portrait photography. You get some insight into modern American nexus of influences, interesting if you know that artist, but I find the sketches less interesting as they move toward current days. The first ones on Henry James, Walt Whitman, and Matthew Brady are among the most engaging.
This was a New York Review of Books Classics choice for March 2024.
This was a New York Review of Books Classics choice for March 2024.
August 14, 2025
A work of entwined fiction and non-fiction, Cohen muses on the unsaid within interactions between the men and women heavily responsible for American cultural history. Spanning the century between the Civil War and Vietnam, Cohen allows us to “eavesdrop” on the great friendships/collaborations between artistic behemoths such as Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Marcel Duchamp, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Avedon, Walt Whitman and Marianne Moore.
March 26, 2018
Best $5.99 I ever spent on Kindle Books!
This book was utterly fascinating. Think 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon for literature and other arts (dance, painting, sculpture).
If you ever wanted to be a bug on the wall when interesting, intelligent people bounce ideas off of each other, this is the book for you!
This book was utterly fascinating. Think 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon for literature and other arts (dance, painting, sculpture).
If you ever wanted to be a bug on the wall when interesting, intelligent people bounce ideas off of each other, this is the book for you!
December 21, 2024
This is a great way to orient yourself in the history of modern American literature, I know almost all of the protagonists from this book but I feel like I have situated them all much better thanks to this book. Well written and furiously well researched, I wasn't expecting this and really enjoyed this one.
February 16, 2025
What an extraordinary piece of writing this! A kind of walking journey through a hundred years of American arts, culture and companionship -- curated exquisitely by author Rachel Cohen whose scholarship and ear for our national idiom leads us effortless from Walt Whitman to Floyd Patterson to Marianne Moore. Riveting, enthralling, miraculous.
April 28, 2025
Good book about politicians, authors, artists, and other known figures in USA history. Very interesting tidbits about each person gleaned from interactions they had with each other. Letters and diaries provided much of the material with the author noting speculation when that is part of the narrative. Again, showed me how little I know about public figures! Highly recommend.
June 5, 2024
Art exists in a vacuum, right? Except when it doesn’t, which turns out to be the case in these short essays, each about a meeting between two or more luminaries of American culture. So much fun to see the links between people, and Cohen’s got a lovely way with the sentence.
Read
July 10, 2024The (actually, generally planned) encounters of major American figures used as a vehicle for examining the history of American letters. A clever premise executed with insight and clarity.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews