Background
James Robert Mellow was born on February 28, 1926, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, United States, to James Robert Mellow and Cecilia Margaret (Sawyer) Mellow.
633 Clark St, Evanston, IL 60208, United States
Northwestern University
The New Leader (magazine)
National Book Award
Guggenheim Fellowship
(Avant-garde Paris comes to life in this "meticulous and l...)
Avant-garde Paris comes to life in this "meticulous and loving reconstruction of the period" (The New York Times Book Review) On almost every Saturday of the first half of the twentieth century, Gertrude Stein would open her door to the likes of Picasso and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Cocteau and Apollinaire, welcoming them into a salon alive with vivid avant-garde paintings and sparkling intellectual conversation. In Charmed Circle, James R. Mellow has re-created this fascinating world and the complex woman who dominated it. His engaging narrative illuminates Stein's writing—now celebrated along with the work of such literary giants as Joyce and Woolf—including her difficult early periods, which adapted cubism and abstraction to the written word. Rich with detail and insight, it conveys both the serene rhythms of daily life with her devoted partner, Alice B. Toklas, and the radical pulse and dramatic upheavals of her exciting era. Spanning the years from 1903, when Stein first arrived in Paris, to her final days at the end of the Second World War, Charmed Circle is a penetrating and lively account of a writer at the heart of modernity.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006MH2RKG/?tag=2022091-20
(Walker Evans (1903-1975) is best known as one of the lead...)
Walker Evans (1903-1975) is best known as one of the leading documentary photographers of the Depression Era, and for his photographs of Alabama sharecroppers in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His FSA photographs have become icons in the American consciousness, and are perhaps the most influential body of photographic work in this century.But Evans was not the propagandist for social causes he was presumed to be; he was, instead, a fastidious observer, recording, simply, the way things were. His instinctive aversion to artiness” contrasted him sharply from his senior Alfred Stieglitz, and his immediate contemporary, Ansel Adams. Evans' eye took him toward the dusty particulars, the backroads of American life, its rundown mill towns, roadside stands, torn movie posters and advertisements for departed minstrel shows. He developed a peculiarly American vernacular, his particular trademark that makes an Evans photograph almost instantly recognizable.With unrestricted access to all of Evans' diaries, letters, work logs and contact sheets, James R. Mellow has produced one of the most finely wrought portraits of a major American artist ever. Also, it is a deeply informed cultural history of the 1930s and '40s and a lively account of friendships and influences with the likes of Lincoln Kirstein and James Agee. Walker Evans (19031975) is best known as one of the leading documentary photographers of the Depression Era, and for his photographs of Alabama sharecroppers in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His FSA photographs have become icons in the American consciousness, and are perhaps the most influential body of photographic work in this century.But Evans was not the propagandist for social causes he was presumed to be; he was, instead, a fastidious observer, recording, simply, the way things were. His instinctive aversion to artiness” contrasted him sharply from his senior Alfred Stieglitz, and his immediate contemporary, Ansel Adams. Evans' eye took him toward the dusty particulars, the backroads of American life, its rundown mill towns, roadside stands, torn movie posters and advertisements for departed minstrel shows. He developed a peculiarly American vernacular, his particular trademark that makes an Evans photograph almost instantly recognizable.With unrestricted access to all of Evans' diaries, letters, work logs and contact sheets, James R. Mellow has produced one of the most finely wrought portraits of a major American artist ever. Also, it is a deeply informed cultural history of the 1930s and '40s and a lively account of friendships and influences with the likes of Lincoln Kirstein and James Agee.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/046509077X/?tag=2022091-20
James Robert Mellow was born on February 28, 1926, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, United States, to James Robert Mellow and Cecilia Margaret (Sawyer) Mellow.
Mellow earned his Bachelor of Science degree at the Northwestern University in 1950.
Mellow was a literary biographer whose breakthrough accomplishment came in 1974 with Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company. Besides his biographies, Mellow’s other career was as a literary and art critic. In the 1950s, Mellow went to New York and wrote for Commonweal, Art News and Arts Magazine. From 1961 to 1965, he was editor-in-chief of The New Leader. He also edited the books The Best in Arts (1962) and New York: The Art World (1964).
Mellow’s first biography, Charmed Circle, focused not only on the life and work of Gertrude Stein, but also her clique that consisted of Picasso, Matisse, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Mellow’s other books include Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (1980), Jim Dine, Recent Work (1980), Picasso, the Avignon Paintings (1981), Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (1984), and Hemingway: A Life without Consequences (1992). Throughout his career, Mellow also served as art and literary critic for the New York Times, Art International and Industrial Design.
As an art critic, Mellow wrote well about the widest range of artists, but his major areas of interest and expertise were the School of Paris and 19th-century American art. As a book critic, he specialized in reviewing biographies. He had nearly finished writing a biography of the photographer Walker Evans.
(Avant-garde Paris comes to life in this "meticulous and l...)
(Walker Evans (1903-1975) is best known as one of the lead...)
Quotations: "The biographer wants the life, against all the reasonable odds, to have the verisimilitude of a period photograph: the exact hour of a certain afternoon, the forgotten details in place, the casual smile or anxious look fixed forever in its particular time. In other words, everything.''
Quotes from others about the person
''Mr. Mellow's love affair with Paris is positively tactile. His knowledge of what happened culturally and intellectually during the 20's is so deep that even the most casual sentence about Hemingway's life conveys related knowledge of his surroundings.'' - Deirdre Bair, The Times Book Reviewer