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Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), the American modernist painter, was also a prolific writer who published dozens of essays and reviews and several volumes of poetry and prose. Yet the revealing memoir he wrote about his own life and relationships has remained unpublished until now. Hartley's text is accompanied by photographs (some never before published), notes, and an introduction discussing Hartley's autobiography in the context of his struggle with notions of self-representation in art. Susan Ryan describes the circumstances surrounding the composition of Somehow a Past, and explains the distinctions between this original version and two later ones also in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Somehow a Past is compelling both as historical document and as personal narrative. Although solitary, self-involved, and saturnine, Hartley nevertheless knew nearly every figure of the international avant-garde in his day and unfolds his life largely through a chain of personal encounters. His traffic with such major literary and artistic figures as Alfred Stieglitz, Vasily Kandinsky, Gertrude Stein, Mable Dodge Luhan, Eugene O'Neill, Robert McAlmon, and Charles Demuth is recorded, as are his travels both domestic and foreign.

"The reader may not find the inner man in 'Somehow a Past' but Hartley is an extraordinary witness to his age....One of the few painters turned writers, Hartley has given us an intensely visual record of a time he called a 'cross 'tween a circus and a sacred affair,' when everything was possible, and the artist's goal was simply to remake the world."

James R. Mellow

"[H]e comes across here as too cool and detached an observer to completely draw us into his world."

Barbara Haskell

Somehow a Past: A Autobiography of Marsden Hartley: Search Results