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Rating: 
Summary: William Dean Howells liked blueberry cake
Review: A CHANCE MEETING, divided into into 36 short chapters, contains stories of the relationships between noted writers and artists from just before the Civil War to the late 1960s. Most of the chapters are framed around a single meeting, but contain digressions which sometimes encompass other famous figures.
What are we to make of this unique, celebratory, and quite often infuriating work? Each chapter is backed up by Rachel Cohen's source notes, detailing the basis for the events and behavior described. Yet, throughout the book there's a curiously speculative tone, Cohen describes many of her beloved figures as "maybe" doing or thinking this or that. In the opening chapter, Henry James (then a young boy) is described as feeling a "persistent uneasiness" while eating ice cream after having his portrait taken by Matthew Brady. Cohen notes this episode is invented, but then one must ask, "Why is this important?" Surely a book very much like this could have been written without such flights of fancy? Indeed, several chapters fail to coalesce at all. In a chapter on Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett, Cohen asserts that the fact Cather did NOT meet Henry James changed the artistic direction of her career. How can this be proven? In most of these vignettes, no direct suggestion is made of how the characters influenced each other. Cohen is edging away from history and criticism and dangerously close to short fiction here. The book picks up in the last third, with some gossipy stuff about Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop and a funny scene of Marianne Moore and Muhammad Ali together, but the whole thing is much too ephemeral. The photographer Richard Avedon provided several photos - he's thanked in the acknowledgements - but did he deserve to be included in the title of several chapters? It's not as if the people he photographed (Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, for example) hadn't met before.
A suggestion: read some of the books Cohen sites in her bibliography instead of A CHANCE MEETING.
Rating: 
Summary: A Chance Meeting : Intertwined Lives of American Writers and
Review: Cohen, who teaches in the Sarah Lawrence nonfiction M.F.A. program, won the 2003 PEN/Jerard Fund Award for emerging women nonfiction writers for the manuscript of this book. Entertaining and accessible, A Chance Meeting shows how the lives of various prominent figures (e.g., Alfred Stieglitz and Hart Crane, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and Norman Mailer) have intertwined to produce some distinctly American forms of expression. Considering the years between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, Cohen evokes the relationships of some 30 writers and artists, focusing on those moments in their lives when they became aware of what it meant to be American (as when a young Henry James posed for Civil War photographer Mathew Brady in his studio). Cohen begins and ends each chapter with fictionalized re-creations of the meetings and then fills in the accounts with facts gleaned from her extensive research and quotes from correspondence and other sources. The fictionalization of these encounters will put off some academics, as will the lack of detailed references. There is an impressive bibliography, but the chapter notes at the end of the book refer to the sources only generally. In the end, alas, the book seems too popular for the academic market and too academic for the popular market. An optional purchase for academic libraries or public libraries with strong literature collections.
Rating: 
Summary: More Fabricated Non-Fiction?
Review: More fiction marketed as non-fiction. Why is this a trend?
Rating:
Summary: Relax and Set Sail on Artistic Adventures with a Noble Cast
Review: Rachel Cohen has created a diversion in A CHANCE MEETING: INTERTWINED LIVES OF AMERICAN ARTISTS, 1854 - 1967 that is more a series of illuminated daydreams than it is a sourcebook for biographical data on the important artists in American over a century spanning 1860s through 1960s. No, this is not a code of secretive encounters between unlikely and disparate writers, photograpahers, and artists, nor is it a professed series of inside stories meant to reveal the truths about those we deem as gifted. Cohen writes splendidly, and though she documents with copious bibliography and chapter notes the instances she encountered in her survey of 'chance meetings ' by a diversity of disparate artists, she seems more intent on using fact as springboard to create cadenzas of intricately woven possibilities to stimulate the reader to enter the wonderful world of 'what if?' than in declaring new-found discoveries of data/gossip. Here in short and terse chapters we meet Matthew Brady, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Marcel Duchamp, Langston Hughes, Hart Crane, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Alfred Steiglitz with and without Georgia O'Keefe, Charlie Chaplin, Richard Avedon, Gertrude Stein with and without Alice B. Toklas, etc., etc. - you get the picture. The joy of Cohen's writing is the possibilities created by perseverating on the conversations that might have occurred among these people, whether in duet or in orchestrated outcome. My bet is that if the casts of characters here discussed were to read these informative and provocative pages, they doubtless would smile, swoon, curse, or laugh, but in some way react to the vision and imagination of Rachel Cohen. This is a delightful book for devout readers and lovers of artistic history. There is so much to learn about artists who even today are on the periphery as well as the giants we all 'think' we know! This wonderful book is for relaxation and diversion and the rewards are many.
Rating:
Summary: Relax and Set Sail on Artistic Adventures with a Noble Cast
Review: Rachel Cohen has created a diversion in A CHANCE MEETING: INTERTWINED LIVES OF AMERICAN ARTISTS, 1854 - 1967 that is more a series of illuminated daydreams than it is a sourcebook for biographical data on the important artists in American over a century spanning 1860s through 1960s. No, this is not a code of secretive encounters between unlikely and disparate writers, photograpahers, and artists, nor is it a professed series of inside stories meant to reveal the truths about those we deem as gifted. Cohen writes splendidly, and though she documents with copious bibliography and chapter notes the instances she encountered in her survey of 'chance meetings ' by a diversity of disparate artists, she seems more intent on using fact as springboard to create cadenzas of intricately woven possibilities to stimulate the reader to enter the wonderful world of 'what if?' than in declaring new-found discoveries of data/gossip. Here in short and terse chapters we meet Matthew Brady, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Marcel Duchamp, Langston Hughes, Hart Crane, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Alfred Steiglitz with and without Georgia O'Keefe, Charlie Chaplin, Richard Avedon, Gertrude Stein with and without Alice B. Toklas, etc., etc. - you get the picture. The joy of Cohen's writing is the possibilities created by perseverating on the conversations that might have occurred among these people, whether in duet or in orchestrated outcome. My bet is that if the casts of characters here discussed were to read these informative and provocative pages, they doubtless would smile, swoon, curse, or laugh, but in some way react to the vision and imagination of Rachel Cohen. This is a delightful book for devout readers and lovers of artistic history. There is so much to learn about artists who even today are on the periphery as well as the giants we all 'think' we know! This wonderful book is for relaxation and diversion and the rewards are many.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book About Artists in America
Review: This is a collection of essays about the private lives of important American authors and artists. Cohen's essays are based almost entirely on secondary works and begin with 19th Century authors and artists and then continue on through the 20th Century.
These essays are written in such a way that you get a feel for the kind of folks that these artistic types actually were. The reader learns all sorts of interesting things about these people such as their vices, lusts and secret desires. This is an excellent book about the history of artistic endeavor in America.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book About Artists in America
Review: This is a collection of essays about the private lives of important American authors and artists. Cohen's essays are based almost entirely on secondary works and begin with 19th Century authors and artists and then continue on through the 20th Century.
These essays are written in such a way that you get a feel for the kind of folks that these artistic types actually were. The reader learns all sorts of interesting things about these people such as their vices, lusts and secret desires. This is an excellent book about the history of artistic endeavor in America.
Rating:
Summary: Geneaology of Genuis
Review: Welcome to an astonishing new literary form -- an interlocking "family tree" of American writers, poets, photographers, musicians, editors, and critics that is part literary gossip, part biography, part cultural history, history of ideas, and, finally an unexpectedly moving elegy of a vanished era whose echoes still sound in our own. A CHANCE MEETING recounts, elaborates and meditates upon the personal connectedness of some of America's greatest artists, connections which range from correspondences and friendships that last more than 40 years (William Dean Howells with Mark Twain and Henry James) or chance meetings which go no further (William Dean Howells and Walt Whitman's meeting at Pfaff's on Broadway in 1850s and once more during Whitman's last years). Starting with its headwaters in Whitman and Hawthorne, Cohen takes us on a voyage down the grand stream of American artistic and literary life, down thickening tributaries unleashed by Henry James and Twain, the shifting crosscurrents of activist W.E.B. DuBois and modernist Gertrude Stein (both students of William James), down new streams from Sarah Orne Jewett and contemporaries Hart Crane, Hurston, Hughes, and Baldwin. She brings in also the rich poetic and artistic contributions of Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, Elizabeth Bishop. Key networkers and artists include photographers Matthew Brady, Stieglitz, Steichen, and Avedon, the insightful and supportive critic from the New York Times, Carl Van Vechten, the brilliant Marcel Duchamp - and this list is nowhere near exhaustive. Henry James once said there is not one but a million windows in the house of fiction. What A CHANCE MEETING remarkably gives us at the end of the journey is the news of the goings on inside that great house, the rivalries, the disagreements, the love affairs, broken friendships, feuds, reconciliations, but most importantly and persistently, the long, looping intimate conversation that flows through and binds together these generations of American artistic life. In so doing, Cohen examines obliquely the alterations in the reportage on the American character, the re-examination of the American character in each generation, revisions which never lose sight of the conversations that have gone before. Profound and playful, Cohen takes some imaginative risks that might unsettle those with strict ideas of what is acceptably told as history. In this regard, Cohen quoting James' insight that Americans have trouble "seeing through to the reality of others" is appropriate: Cohen can and does see through to the reality of these most remarkable others, and we are much the richer for her wise and stylish audacity.
Rating:
Summary: Comfort Reading
Review: What an exhilierating experience! I savored these 36 essays over a few weeks, reading only a handful a night before I went to bed. The book is just beautiful; there is no other word to describe the writing, tone, and voice of Rachel Cohen's book.
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