front cover of Covarrubias
Covarrubias
By Adriana Williams
University of Texas Press, 1994

At the center of an artistic milieu as vital and exciting as the Left Bank of Paris or Greenwich Village, Rosa and Miguel Covarrubias knew almost everyone in the limelight of the 1930s and 1940s—Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten, John Huston, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo, to name just a few. As fascinating themselves as any of their friends, the couple together fostered a renaissance of interest in the history and traditional arts of Mexico's indigenous peoples, while amassing an extraordinary collection of art that ranged from pre-Hispanic Olmec and Aztec sculptures to the work of Diego Rivera.

Written by a long-time friend of Rosa, this book presents a sparkling account of the life and times of Rosa and Miguel. Adriana Williams begins with Miguel's birth in 1904 and follows the brilliant early flowering of his artistic career as a renowned caricaturist for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker magazines, his meeting and marriage with Rosa at the height of her New York dancing career, and their many years of professional collaboration on projects ranging from dance to anthropology to painting and art collecting to the development of museums to preserve Mexico's pre-Columbian heritage. Interviewing as many of their friends as possible, Williams fills her narrative with reminiscences that illuminate Miguel's multifaceted talents, Rosa's crucial collaboration in many of his projects, and their often tempestuous relationship.

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front cover of Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote
Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote
Megan Riley McGilchrist
University of Nevada Press, 2021
Combining a breadth of scholarship, insightful critical thinking, and an engaging personal interaction with Mary Hallock Foote’s substantial collection of illustrations and writings, Megan Riley McGilchrist provides a significant contribution to western literature and the lives of western writers. 

Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote opens a window into the remarkable, little-known nineteenth-century personal history of accomplished American author and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote, a woman both of her time, and ahead of it. When Mary gave up a successful career as an illustrator in New York to follow her husband, a mining engineer, to the West, she found herself in a new, unfamiliar, and often challenging world—sometimes feeling like an exile. The thousands of pages of her unpublished letters, which form the foundation of this book, give rare insight into the process of acculturation and eventually the transformation that she experienced. This wide-ranging analysis also examines the role that nature and Mary’s lifelong connection with the natural world played in her adaptation to the western mining towns where she spent much of the rest of her life. 

In many ways, Mary’s life mirrored that of author Megan Riley McGilchrist, whose parallel exile began in 1977 when she left America for England. Drawing equivalences with Mary’s life as an exile and her own life as an expatriate American woman, Megan provides a meditation on her own transformation, as much as on Mary’s. Megan demonstrates what it has been like to be a twenty-first-century American expatriate, Californian-turned-Londoner—to find common ground in the life of a nineteenth-century woman.

Comprising elements of biography, literary analysis, history, and personal history, and containing many unpublished excerpts from Mary’s voluminous correspondence, Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote offers insight into the ways Mary perceived the world around her. It also provides insight into the experiences of exiles of any time—people who have left a familiar environment to embark on a new life in a new and not necessarily comfortable setting.
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front cover of The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843
The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843
Richard Doyle
Ohio University Press, 2015

Before he joined the staff of Punch and designed its iconic front cover, illustrator Richard “Dicky” Doyle was a young man whose father (political caricaturist John Doyle) charged him with sending a weekly letter, even though they lived under the same roof. This volume collects the fifty-three illustrated missives in their entirety for the first time and provides an uncommon peek into the intimate but expansive observations of a precocious social commentator and artist.

In a series of vivid manuscript canvases, Doyle observes Victorian customs and society. He visits operas, plays, and parades. He watches the queen visiting the House of Commons and witnesses the state funeral of the Duke of Sussex. He is caught up in the Chartist riots of August 1842 and is robbed during one of the melees. And he provides countless illustrations of ordinary people strolling in the streets and swarming the parks and picture galleries of the metropolis. The sketches offer a fresh perspective on major social and cultural events of London during the early 1840s by a keen observer not yet twenty years old.

Doyle’s epistles anticipate the modern comic strip and the graphic novel, especially in their experimentation with sequential narrative and their ingenious use of space. The letters are accompanied by a full biographical and critical introduction with new material about Doyle’s life.

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front cover of Nature's Engraver
Nature's Engraver
A Life of Thomas Bewick
Jenny Uglow
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Thomas Bewick’s (1753–1828) History of British Birds was the first field guide for ordinary people, illustrated with woodcuts of astonishing accuracy and beauty. In Nature’s Engraver, Jenny Uglow tells the story of the farmer’s son from Tyneside who became one of Britain’s greatest and most popular engravers. It is a story of violent change, radical politics, lost ways of life, and the beauty of the wild—a journey to the beginning of our lasting obsession with the natural world.

 “A refined and engaging biography, as beautifully wrought, in its way, as Bewick’s woodcuts.”—New York Times

“Uglow’s clear prose sparkles like Bewick’s River Tyne.”—Los Angeles Times

“This is a lovely book, not just in the quality and sympathy of the writing but in the care of its design and illustration. [Uglow] has turned a rich but undramatic life into a vignette as full of interest and details as one of Bewick’s own woodcuts.”—Sunday Telegraph

 

“A splendid biography. But it becomes an endearing one by the scattered presence of so many of Bewick’s woodcuts.”—Washington Post

 

“Another triumph for England’s most innovative biographer, and a marvelous treat for fans of Bewick’s beguiling work.”—Kirkus Reviews

 

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logo for American Library Association
Pura Belpré Awards
Celebrating Latino Authors and Illustrators
Rose Zertuche Treviño
American Library Association, 2006


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