"They met in ordinary ways," writes Rachel Cohen in her introduction, "a careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend's casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks. . . . They talked to each other for a few hours or for forty years, and later it seemed to them impossible that they could have missed each other."

Each chapter of this inventive consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. In 1854, Henry James, as a boy, goes with his father to have a daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady and is captured in a moment of self-consciousness about being American. Brady returns to photograph Walt Whitman and, later, at City Point in the midst of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant. Meanwhile, Henry James begins a lasting friendship with William Dean Howells, and also meets Sarah Orne Jewett, who in turn is a mentor to Willa Cather. Mark Twain publishes Grant's memoirs; W.E.B. Du Bois and his professor William James visit the young Helen Keller; and Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz argue about photography. Later, Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein, who was also a student of William James's, attend a performance of The Rite of Spring; Hart Crane goes out on the town with Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston write a play together; Elizabeth Bishop takes Marianne Moore, who was photographed by both Van Vechten and Richard Avedon, to the circus; Avedon and James Baldwin collaborate on a book; John Cage and Marcel Duchamp play chess; and Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell march on the Pentagon in the anti-Vietnam War demonstration of 1967. The accumulation of these pairings draws the reader into the mysterious process through which creativity has been sparked and passed on among iconoclastic American writers and artists.

Ultimately, Rachel Cohen reveals a long chain of friendship, rebellion, and influence stretching from the moment just before the Civil War through a century that had a profound effect on our own time. Drawing on a decade of research, A Chance Meeting makes its own illuminating contribution to the tradition of which Cohen writes.

"Enthralling... What is being divined is nothing less than a century or so of American taste, the nature of modern literary and artistic tangency in the United States... Rachel Cohen's vision of the life of art in her chosen century, and the effect of that vision upon her reader, is one of an astonishing gladness."
   RICHARD HOWARD, FRONT PAGE REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"Innovative...faultless... [Cohen] gives us a more intimate sense of these people in a few pages than one sometimes gleans from entire biographies."
   THE NEW YORKER

"Rachel Cohen has created a masterpiece of variety and balance in her first book. A Chance Meeting takes 30 American writers and artists from Henry James to Robert Lowell, and braids them together in 36 encounters. Each person comes round two or three times, and every meeting, friendship and collaboration has a resonance that can be heard down the ages until what you have before you is an immense chain of artistic consequences.... [And] beyond the anecdotage, and the characters and the circumstances, there begin to accrue some of the essential traits of American writing and American art... Fascinating."
   THE ECONOMIST

"Captivating...like an elaborate fugue...[Cohen's] prose is elegant yet plain, and her judgments sound and generous... While carving a set of brilliant miniatures, Cohen is also indirectly telling a story of sex, race, political protest, and celebrity c