Famous and infamous American characters | AMERICAN CHARACTERS Selections from the National Portrait...

A Thousand Words? Not me! | AMERICAN CHARACTERS Selections from the National Portrait Gallery, Accompanied by Literary Portraits | R. W. B. and Nancy Lewis Lewis

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	• AMERICAN CHARACTERS Selections from the National Portrait Gallery, Accompanied by Literary Portraits R. W. B. and Nancy Lewis Lewis Yale University Press, 1999 - 412 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews
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Irreverence Personified

An irreverent and eclectic collection of rogues, criminals, patriots, founding fathers, and a gallery of national heroes, all with life-sized high quality photos and a one-page tightly written biographic synopsis of the characters, explaining why they are important to American culture.

One of the rewards of the book is that except for the period of the revolution, only a handful of politicians are included. The pictures are taken from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

The portraits are of good enough quality that I have scanned them into by own iphoto library. The book is a bit pricey but still is a good value considering all it includes. Four stars.

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Famous and infamous American characters

The National Portrait Gallery is now closed for renovation, but this book provides a peek at this museum of personalities. The expected hero's are here like Jefferson, Lincoln, and Robert Frost, but so are the uniquely American villains like Al Capone and Jesse James. Each of the 160 full page portraits is preceded by a paragraph giving a brief biography, and, more interestingly, a quote by the person portrayed or a revealing paragraph from another American figure. For example for Al Capone he states "I've been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor. I've given people the light pleasures, shown them a good time". These characters are often interrelated, as Thomas Jefferson talks of John Adams, and Emerson writes in his journals about Daniel Webster. The arts are well represented also, and America's contributions to music include portraits of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, W.C Handy, and George Gershwin (in a unique self portrait). This book also gives a glimpse of the history of portraiture including paintings, daguerreotypes, and photographs. In the case of Matthew Brady, there are both photographs by him, and of him. Very enjoyable book to browse!

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A Thousand Words? Not me!

Each portrait - photo, oil painting, pencil sketch, bronze bust - in this massive tome is worth a thousand or more words of history. Fortunately, the editors' comments are limited to one page of pithy quotes and a brief biographical sketch for each character portrayed. The portrayals, in order of appearance, range from Pocahontas to Walt Disney, with 158 remarkable personages between - authors, radical activists, Indian chiefs, sscientists, blues singers, Civil War generals, and blessedly few presidents. This is a book to sit and get lost in, once in a while.

The National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, has recently been renovated. Its interior courtyard is now one of the pleasantest places to sit and have coffee in all DC, especially on a heat-stroke summer day. The exhibits are, like all DC museums, rather too ample for comfort. Take on just one wing if you visit, and look at each character more thoughtfully; you'll get more from it. It used to be a mausoleum of American chauvinism, but times have changed and simple values have been challenged. There's a good deal of skepticism, impertinence, and controversy on exhibit in DC now. Hallelujah!

Note that amazon has used copies of this publication monument for absurdly low prices.

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jacket summary

This delightful book brings together 160 famous American figures from Pocahontas to Louis Armstrong, providing visual and verbal portraits that illuminate their place in American life. The portraiture - painting, sculpture, photograph, or drawing - is paired with literary images taken from eyewitness accounts, memoirs, poems, letters, and biographies, and with lively and informative commentary by the editors,
RWB and Nancy Lewis. The whole is a rich addition to American cultural history.

The gallery of portraits includes statesmen and outlaws, artists and athletes, and writers and performers, all described by commentators who are equally colorful and illustrious. The book features, for example, John Guare on Eugene O'Neill, Al Capone on himself, Adlai Stevenson on Eleanor Roosevelt, Pete Seeger on Woody Guthrie, Stieglitz and O'Keeffe on each other, e.e. cummings on Buffalo Bill Cody, Arthur Ashe on Joe Louis and Gertrude Stein on Ulysses S. Grant. Some of the verbal portraits were composed especially for this book, among them Harold Bloom on Joseph Smith, Russell Baker on HL Mencken, John Hollander on Wallace Stevens, John Updike on Ernest Hemingway, and Robert B Parker on Dashiell Hammett. All of the images are from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, where RWB Lewis has been a member of the Board of Commissioners since 1986.

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