Author(s): R. J. Smith

Artists

A frumpy, remote, melancholy, and seemingly unknowable man, Robert Frank found himself at the red-hot social center of bohemian New York in the '50s and '60s after emigrating from Switzerland in 1947. He enjoyed close friendships with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky as well as photographer Walker Evans, writer James Agee, and painters Alice Neel and Larry Rivers. In the mid-'50s, Frank and his family took a long road trip across America where he took 27,000 photographs, 83 of which would be collected in The Americans, his best-known work. At first harshly criticized for its bleak portrait of a segregated America, the collection gradually grew to be recognized as a transformative artistic document of the era. American Witness is a compelling portrait of a great artist and his times and the seismic impact he had upon them. The first biography of Robert Frank, one of the world's greatest and most influential photographers, but the author of the acclaimed James Brown biography The One.