American Characters: Selections from the National Portrait Gallery, Accompanied by Literary Portraits

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.

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!