The Unknown Night: The Madness and Genius of R.A. Blakelock, an American Painter

(This remarkable biography--unprecedented in its comprehensiveness and authority--chronicles the life, times, and madness of one of America's most celebrated and exploited painters. Ranging from Blakelock's childhood in Greenwich Village, his youthful journeys among the Sioux and Uinta Indians, and the years in which he struggled to support his family by peddling his canvases door-to-door and playing piano in vaudeville theaters, this book is also a portrait of a vanished world. In it, we are introduced to the New York of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--a city of artists' studios and spiritualists' salons, shantytowns and millionaries' mansions. Impressively researched, filled with human drama and vivid period detail, and in the tradition of A Beautiful Mind and The Professor and the Madman, The Unknown Night is a seductive mixture of scholarship and storytelling.