Dylan Thomas

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Alastair Gordon

"Early one day in the summer of 1993, the famously prolific architect Norman Jaffe went for a swim at the beach in Bridgehampton, New York, leaving his clothes in a neat little pile on the sand, as he did almost every morning. But this particular morning, he never returned. With his disappearance, he left behind many unanswered questions - not only about the cause of his death, but about the nature of his architectural legacy." "Romantic Modernist: The Life and Work of Norman Jaffe, Architect is the first book to explore Jaffe's body of work and the inner struggle that shaped his life. A magnetic, free-spirited individual, he approached his work with a sense of passion that was all but unrivaled in the world of architecture. Over the course of his career, he established himself as an innovator in solar and urban design, but he is best known for his strikingly sculptural houses in the Hamptons, from small hideaways to sprawling estates, to which he brought an almost mystical vision: with the perfect balance of light and shadow and the right proportions and materials, he was convinced, houses could provide what he described as "dreamlike, romantic journeys" that offered an opportunity for self-discovery." "Through interviews with Jaffe's closest friends and associates, as well as exhaustive archival research, critic Alastair Gordon traces Jaffe's career trajectory from his early years on the West Coast through his increasingly celebrated life in New York and his premature, unexplained death. Hundreds of original drawings and color photographs illustrate Jaffe's story, offering a rare look at this charismatic figure whose life was as interesting as the work he produced."--Jacket.

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John F. Szwed

Sun Ra - a/k/a Herman Poole "Sonny" Blount - was born in Alabama on May 22, 1914. But like Father Divine and Elijah Muhammad, he made a lifelong effort to obscure many of the facts of his early life. After years as a rehearsal pianist for nightclub revues and in blues and swing bands, including Wynonie Harris's and Fletcher Henderson's, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to find a way to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters through the various incarnations of the Intergalactic Arkestra. His repertoire ranging from boogie-woogie, swing, and bebop to free form, fusion, and whatever, Sun Ra was above all a paragon of contradictions: profundity and vaudeville; technical pianistic virtuosity and irony; assiduous attention to arrangements and encouragement of collective improvisation; respect for tradition and celebration of the fresh. Some might have been bemused by his Afro-Platonic neo-hermeticism; others might have laughed at his egregious excesses. But Sun Ra was at once the last of the great romantic composers, one of the premier avant-gardists of the latter half of the twentieth century, and a black cultural nationalist who extended Afrocentrism from ancient Egypt to the heavens.

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Patricia Morrisroe

Robert Mapplethorpe was one of the most famous and controversial figures in the contemporary art world. Some of his photographs were praised for their startlingly beautiful composition, others condemned for their explicit sexuality. He was an artistic enigma. In 1989, three months after Mapplethorpe's death at forty-two, the Corcoran Gallery of Art canceled a show of his work, igniting a fierce battle over federal funding of "objectionable" art. When the exhibit arrived in Cincinnati a year later, the Center for Contemporary Art and its director were ordered to stand trial on obscenity charges - the first time a gallery in the United States faced prosecution for the art it displayed. In this remarkable biography, Patricia Morrisroe chronicles Mapplethorpe's singular life and the development of his unique art against the background of American culture during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Mapplethorpe: A Biography reveals a life even more daring than the photographer's art. Selected by Mapplethorpe to write his story, Patricia Morrisroe conducted numerous interviews with the artist before his death, as well as with hundreds of people who knew him during the different periods of his life. Powerful and provocative, Mapplethorpe is the definitive biography of one of America's most celebrated photographers.

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Bill Whiting

"The true story of the life and untimely death of ... young artist named Daniel Arthur Allen. When one of Dan's mysterious, jewel-like paintings was discovered in the vault of a major museum nearly four decades after his death, artist Bill Whiting began to write about his life with Danny in Rochester, New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the sexual revolution, drugs, gay liberation, and antiwar protests made everyday life anything but predictable"--Back cover.