Full AspenCat Catalog

Gordon Parks--photographer for Life magazine, writer, composer, artist, and filmmaker--was only 16 in 1928 when he moved from Kansas to St. Paul, Minnesota, after his mother's death. There, homeless and hungry, he began his fight to survive, to educate himself, and to "prove my worth." Working as a janitor, railroad porter, musician, or basketball player in such places as St. Paul, Chicago, and New York, Parks struggled against poverty and racism....

"New essays from the vantage point of very old age, once again "alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny,"* from the former poet laureate of the United States *(New York Times)" --

"A gripping group portrait of six revolutionary women writers during World War II "I am going to Spain with the boys," Martha Gellhorn wrote. "I don't know who the boys are but I am going with them." On the front lines of the Second World War, the lives of six remarkable women intertwined: Lee Miller, the Vogue cover model and photographer who lived in Paris as Man Ray's lover before becoming a war correspondent for the magazine; Martha Gellhorn,...

Profiles American photographer Dorothea Lange, who came to the attention of the world with her photographs documenting the Great Depression, and achieved lasting fame in the post-War years.

"From the late twenties to the early fifties, photographer George Platt Lynes, painter Paul Cadmus, and critic Lincoln Kirstein jointly and separately were among the most influential figures in the burgeoning art scene. Centered in New York City, they helped create and define the esthetic and the institutions of the American art world and had an enormous impact around the world. With an overlapping circle of friends, lovers, collaborators, and models,...

"For the first thirty years of the twentieth century, the streets surrounding the intersection of the boulevard du Montparnasse and the boulevard Raspail marked the center of avant-garde Europe. Man Ray's Montparnasse introduces the reader to this small section of Paris on the Left Bank during a time of artistic ferment and experimentation, of private affairs that became public ones, and of political and social change.". "Man Ray, the renowned photographer,...

In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City: the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.

"When Annette Gendler falls in love with a Jewish man in Germany in 1985, she knows their love has already happened--in her own family, no less. Her German great-aunt Resi was married to a Jew in Czechoslovakia before World War II--a marriage that created tremendous difficulties for the extended family once the Nazis took over. Annette and Harry's love, meanwhile, is the ultimate nightmare for Harry's family of Holocaust survivors. Weighed down by...