Author Description

Walker Evans's haunting images of southern sharecroppers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men were as revolutionary in their time as James Agee's text and are now deeply ingrained in the American consciousness. In the first full biography of this intriguing and enigmatic artist, a leading national authority on Evans looks beyond the calculated anonymity of his work to reveal the singular obsessions behind it. A man in love with Americana, Evans was a sensualist, a junk collector, a connoisseur, a wit, a perpetual weekend guest. His friendships with Hart Crane, Lincoln Kirstein, and James Agee drew him into the promiscuous New York literary scene in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, and his fierce independence from contemporaries such as Ansel Adams and Margaret Bourke-White brought him notoriety among photographers. Both charismatic and seductively aloof, Evans had a spy's genius for capturing the telling detail. From his rise to prominence with the founding of the Museum of Modern Art to his work