A Chance Meeting: American Encounters

Contains

Canonical title

A Chance Meeting: American Encounters

Original title

AChance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists

Original publication date

2004

Epigraph

If a walk across the Park, with a responsive friend, late on the golden afternoon of a warm week-day, and if a consequent desultory stroll, for speculation's sake, through certain northward and eastward streets and avenues, o... (show all)f an identity a little vague to me now, save as a blur of builded evidence as to proprietary incomes--if such an incident ministered, on the spot, to a boundless evocation, it then became history of a splendid order: but I perhaps must add that it became so for the two participants alone, and with an effect after all not easy to communicate.
--Henry James, The American Scene, 1907

Dedication

To Hilary and Michael Cohen

First words

As if a river should carry all
the scenes that it had once reflected
shut in its waters...

In the middle of A Chance Meeting, Rachel Cohen tells us exactly where she got the title and, maybe, the germ of t... (show all)he idea, for her unique and beautifully written book of cultural history. (Foreword)

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The thirty people gathered here met in ordinary ways: A careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend's casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks. (Introduction to the First ... (show all)Edition)

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Double portraits are an uncommon form in essays and biography, and, thirty years ago, I could not have said why it became an internal imperative for me to learn to write them. (Author's Afterword)

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)They're as pleased with her as she is with them. (Foreword)

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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I have grown a little more used to the idea that we all, as Willa Cather remembered Marcel Proust having written, take our great men and women with us when we go. (Introduction to the First Edition)

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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Reading is a little different in every time and circumstance; I hope, for you who find this book now, that it may go on offering something of the strange and wonderful companionship these figures found among themselves. (Author's Afterword)

Publisher's editor

Smith, Ileene; Dreyer, Benjamin; Foley, Deborah; Martin, Jynne; Rockwood, Stacy

Blurbers

Eggers, Dave; Pinsky, Robert; McWhorter, Diane; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.; Carhart, Thad; Weschler, Lawrence (show all 9); Dyer, Geoff; Schwartz, John Burnham; Howard, Richard

Original language

English