Writers: Photographs by Nancy Crampton

More than a hundred wonderful and sensitive duotone portraits of our major novelists, poets, and playwrights.

Paired with the photographs are fascinating texts from each writer on writing-thoughts on the craft, recollections of significant moments from their personal history, meditations on the civic importance of writing, and so forth. Some of the photographs in this treasure trove are already well known-Bellow, Mailer, Cheever, Wolfe, Singer, and Capote, to name a few. Others have never before been published. Many were taken on location, from Tom Stoppard in London and James Baldwin in Provence to Gabríel Garcia Márquez in Mexico City-one of ten Nobel Prize winners in the book. Closer to home, we have Eudora Welty in Jackson, Nelson Algren in Chicago, Philip Roth and Maurice Sendak in rural Connecticut, Anne Sexton and John Updike near Boston, Walker Percy in Louisiana, Christopher Isherwood in Santa Monica, Annie Proulx in Wyoming, and several writers in the Hamptons. Whatever the setting, the images are strikingly fresh and authentic. The pithy and idiosyncratic thoughts on writing are a perfect complement to the superb portraits; often words and pictures seem to exist in a magical rapport. For all of us who care about the American literary scene, Nancy Crampton's intimate look at our literary heroes, our Writers, is a gift. 104 duotone photographs.

Nancy Crampton lives in New York City and is the official photographer of the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, famous for its literary readings. Hundreds of book jackets and magazine articles have featured her photographs. Former Poet Laureate of the United States Mark Strand is a professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He has written ten books of poetry, and his 1999 book A Blizzard of One won him the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.