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In this first full biography of the enigmatic artist, a leading national authority on Evans brilliantly penetrates the calculated anonymity of his work to reveal the obsessions behind it. A man in love with Americana, Evans was a sensualist, a junk collector, a connoisseur, a wit, a perpetual weekend guest. Charismatic and seductive, he attracted many of the brightest talents of his day. He counted Hart Crane, James Agee, Lincoln Kirstein, Ben Shahn, and Berenice Abbott among his closest friends, and with them he reveled in the intellectual and sexual freedom that distinguished the New York art world during his lifetime. Evans loved nothing better than a good party, and he attended all the best ones in the half-century from the 1920s to the 1970s. A social chameleon, he was as much at ease in bohemian Greenwich Village as in the heady West Side circle that included Robert Penn Warren, Lionel Trilling, and Alfred Kazin. Belinda Rathbone interviewed more than a hundred friends and colleagues of Evans' as well as his two former wives, and combed archives and letters to illuminate his singular vision and the complex personality Evans so carefully withheld from his photographs. The result is a portrait not only of an artist who profoundly influenced the generation of photographers who followed him but also of the artistically fecund times that nurtured him.

"[Rathbone] ably assembles a smooth tale of not only Walker Evan's life, but the aesthetic and ethical debates that complicate documentary photography and, indeed, all representation. When Rathbone recounts Evan's use of periscopic cameras so subjects were unaware of being photographed, or his subway expeditions to shoot passengers from between the buttons of his coat, we are reminded just how much any art is fed by theft and betrayal."

Albert Mobilio, Word, June 1995

"Belinda Rathbone...has done a worthy job of marshaling the known facts and recollections of acquaintances into a coherent and readable account....[her] greatest achievement...is to convey some sense of her subject's troubled personal life."

Charles Hagen, New York Times Book Review, 06/25/1995

Walker Evans: A Biography: Search Results