A CHANCE MEETING: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967.

London:: Jonathan Cape,, (1994). Hardcover first edition -. Fine in fine dust jacket.. First UK printing. An unusual book of over a century of American literary history - "Each chapter of this inventive consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. In 1854, Henry James, as a boy, goes with his father to have a daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady. . Sarah Orne Jewett, who in turn is a mentor to Willa Cather. Mark Twain publishes Grants memoirs; W.E.B. Du Bois and his professor William James visit the young Helen Keller; and Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz argue about photography. Later, Hart Crane goes out on the town with Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston write a play together; Elizabeth Bishop takes Marianne Moore, who was photographed by both Van Vechten and Richard Avedon, to the circus; Avedon and James Baldwin collaborate on a book; John Cage and Marcel Duchamp play chess; and Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell march on the Pentagon in the antiVietnam War demonstration of 1967." Notes, bibliography, index. xvii, 363 pp. Illustrated endpapers.