Fred W. McDarrah - New York Scenes

248 pages
Text(s) by Sean Wilentz
Photos by Fred W. McDarrah
28.8 x 23.3 cm
Language: English
Hardcover
Publisher: Abrams Books
2018

During his 50-year association with the »Village Voice«, Fred W. McDarrah (1926–2007) covered the city’s downtown scenes, producing an unmatched and encyclopedic visual record of people, movements, and events. McDarrah frequented the bars, cafés, and galleries where writers, artists, and musicians gathered, and he was welcome in the apartments and lofts of the city’s avant-garde cultural aristocracy. He captured every vital moment, from Jack Kerouac reading poetry, to Bob Dylan hanging out in Sheridan Square, to Andy Warhol filming in the Factory, to the Stonewall Riots. Through his lens, we see the legendary birth of ideas and attitudes that continue to shape the character and allure of New York today.

Sean Wilentz is the author of »Bob Dylan in America» (2010) and »The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln« (2005), for which he won the Bancroft Prize. He is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University. Wilentz’s father and uncle were co-owners of the legendary Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, and he grew up in the world that Fred McDarrah captured with his lens. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.