RACHEL COHEN, WRITER

“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, LA Times Book Review

Rachel Cohen grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and graduated from Harvard University. She has written for The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, The Threepenny Review, The Guardian, McSweeney's and other publications, and her essays have been anthologized in the Pushcart Anthology and in Best American Essays. Her book, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists was published in 2004 by Random House in the US and the UK and won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize and the PEN/Martha Albrand First Nonfiction Award. A Chance Meeting will be published by Adelphi in Italy in Spring 2006. Cohen is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and has been a fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony and Breadloaf. She teaches undergraduate and graduate students in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Queens.

ABOUT A CHANCE MEETING: INTERTWINED LIVES OF AMERICAN WRITERS AND ARTISTS

“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

“In her fresh and revelatory portraits and analysis, Cohen assesses each creative individual's impact on American culture and each other in light of issues related to class, race, sexual orientation, politics, and aesthetics. Talk about bringing cultural history to life: this is a veritable party.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist

“The thirty people gathered here 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 saw each other first in a photography studio, or a magazine office, and they talked for a few hours or for forty years. Later it felt to them, as it often does, entirely by chance that they had met and yet 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.