Author Photo: Portraits, 1983-2002

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The writing life has long captured our collective imagination. What is it about writers, we wonder, that empowers them to work words into shapes and patterns that move us? The most affecting photographs possess that same power — to reach out upon first sight, to capture our hearts and minds, to leave us smitten. Such is the feeling that comes from gazing at the work of Marion Ettlinger, a photographer celebrated for her “literary portrait power” (The Wall Street Journal). Author Photo collects, for the first time in book form, more than two hundred of Ettlinger’s most famous photographs. Immortalized in these pages are many of America’s greatest writers, including Raymond Carver, Francine Prose, Walter Mosley, Mary Karr, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Truman Capote, Cormac McCarthy, Patricia Highsmith, Ken Kesey, Edwidge Danticat, and Jeffrey Eugenides. According to one of Ettlinger’s Pulitzer Prize-winning subjects, “starkness and a sense of shadows” are at the core of her artistic allure. Shot exclusively in natural light and in black-and-white film, each of these images is an intimate artwork, putting the reader closer than ever before to the writers they revere and admire. A photographic paean to the literary spirit, Author Photo opens a rare and revealing window onto the timelessness of creativity.

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