A major representative of the period and its cultural momentum is Albert Einstein, who may be said to have changed our ideas about the universe. He is seen in a woodcut of 1952 by Antonio Frasconi, an Argentina-born Italian artist who came to America in 1945 and here earned a fine reputation for his woodcut portraits (among others, of Duke Ellington and Woody Guthrie) and his 1962 series of photographs based on the work of Garcia Lorca. It is Howard Moss, prize-winning poet and poetry editor of the New Yorker, who supplies the verse portrait of Einstein.

Only the stars defined his radius;
His life, restricted to a wooden house,
Was in his head.

He saw a fledgling fall.
Two times he tried to nest it, but it fell.
Once more he tried; he wandered
     home again.

A violin player lacking vanities,
A giant wit among the homilies –
We have no parallel to that immense
    intelligence.

Once again, a stirringly diverse verbal image is brought into play, this one stressing Einstein’s attachment to the natural and the primitive. It is a memoir of Einstein out sailing, as described by his European friend Antonin Vallentin in a 1963 biography:

In the case of Langston Hughes, the central figure in the section devoted to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the poetry comes from the subject himself, a wincingly ironic self-portrait of 1947 called "Genius Child." In earlier sections, it might be noted, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington have made their appearances, as, so to say, the father and the uncle of the Renaissance.

The photograph of Hughes is the work of Edward Weston, otherwise known for his wonderfully various photographs of American Western life and landscape. It is a picture that gives us immediately Hughes’s smiling all-observing personality and is one of the most engaging visual images in the collection. But though Hughes had been acknowledged as the country’s leading Black poet ever since his volume The Weary Blues in 1927, he still smarted, evidently, under his father’s deprecatory view of him—the theme of the poem presented.

With this poem and others, Hughes (as his book’s title suggests) interwove the rhythms and idiom of his poetry with the rhythms of the blues and its sibling jazz. Hughes’s general cultural accomplishment can be associated with that of W. C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington—to name three of the figures who show up in our final section.

Hughes also tells us, in a matching passage from a 1940 article, that his "chief literary influences" were Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman and that his "favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong."

The last named was a supremely talented prizefighter who at the time, 1937–38, simultaneously held the featherweight, welterweight, and lightweight world titles. The sporting reference can carry us ahead to the next entry to be considered, that of Babe Ruth, the great Bambino of the New York Yankees. Ruth is captured, sitting in the dugout, bat in hand, in a 1927 photograph by Nicholas Muray (1882–1963), the Hungarian-born artist who became the most stylish and inventive photographer on the New York scene from the 1920s to the 1960s, with portraits, among many others, of Fred Astaire, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Claude Monet, and Marilyn Monroe. Red Smith, the equally stylish and inventive sportswriter, provides the verbal account. Smith writes "it wasn’t just that he hit more home runs than anyone else, he hit them better, higher, farther, with more theatrical timing and a more flamboyant flourish. Nobody could strike out like Babe Ruth. Nobody circled the bases with the same pigeon-toed mincing majesty." This, of course, was written before the 1998 season of Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa, but most of the passage can probably stand.

A special source of enjoyment in preparing this book has been the attempt to make the exactly right match of subject and verbal commentator. In these last entries to be considered now, we pretty much struck gold.

George Gershwin, whom we come to next, appears in a self-portrait of 1934, which is also a superb visual self-appraisal. The literary image is taken from Harold Acton’s classic memoir of 1948, in which the widely honored British essayist and historian tells about his undergraduate days at Oxford in the 1920s. "Parties motored from college to college. . . . Conversation was stifled by a gramophone, and the talkative devised a special basic English in which to shoot wisecracks at each other in the style of Noel Coward." He goes on:

Rhapsody in Blue had been commissioned by Paul Whiteman in 1924, the same year that saw two of Gershwin’s best musical comedies, Lady Be Good and Girl Crazy. An American in Paris followed in 1928, Of Thee I Sing in 1932 and the opera Porgy and Bess in 1934–35. Gershwin had just completed one of his best jazz songs, with his brother Ira, Our Love Is Here to Stay, when he died in 1937 at age thirty-nine. The centenary of his birth, 1998, has seen endless performances of his work, jazz, symphonic, and operatic.

With Ernest Hemingway, we were lucky enough to find both the perfect artist, the photographer Robert Capa, and literary portrayer, the novelist John Updike. Robert Capa, the quintessential war photographer—in Spain, in World War II, in Korea (where he was killed by an exploding mine in 1954)—is just the person to portray Hemingway, whom he spots in some hunting territory, perhaps in Idaho, in 1944. Updike, the author of the Rabbit Angstrom series and many other first-class novels, is also a singularly cultivated and judicious literary critic. He speaks of Hemingway in an article composed especially for our volume. "[Hemingway] projected not just a literary style but a style of life. For several generations, American men carried themselves with a laconic stoicism and consoled themselves with an elemental hedonism of sensation and beverage and place because Hemingway had done so."

Updike sketches in the portrait. "He had nearly died at age eighteen of an exploding shell in Italy, and hunting and killing was the one way of keeping alive the authenticity of that experience." Updike then studies the Capa photograph and continues: "Here he crouches with a gun, but his glasses make him look scholarly, which in his fashion he was. As celebrity and alcohol got to him he became easy to mock, as his style was easy to parody, but up to and including his ending his life with a shotgun he kept an epic dignity, the stark Greek dignity of those who challenge the gods." Hemingway, who had won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954, killed himself in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961 at age sixty-two.

Updike’s verbal portrait was one of eight written (by friends and associates) for this volume. Here are match-ups that we could do something about arranging, and they include Harold Bloom, who has written vigorously about American religion, on Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon sect; the nature writer Edward Hoagland on John Muir; the journalist Russell Baker on his fellow-Baltimorean H. L. Mencken; the poet John Hollander on Wallace Stevens; the playwright John Guare on Eugene O’Neill; the mystery writer Robert B. Parker on Dashiell Hammett; and the actress Irene Worth on the monologist Ruth Draper.

Moving to another dimension of the modern American world, the dimension of politics and power, we arrive at what is perhaps the most surprisingly apt combination in the book—that of former President Harry S. Truman, as observed and remarked on by the art connoisseur Bernard Berenson, at his villa outside of Florence in 1956.

Truman is one of half a dozen American presidents in this century who are presented in the book, along with Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy. Truman is pictured in his White House years by George Tames, a New York Times photographer for more than forty years and admired especially for his animated and revealing portraits of the (as it has been said) residents of the corridors of power. Truman is seen in a characteristic moment, walking down the White House steps jauntily waving his umbrella. The verbal account comes from some years later, however, after Truman, with his wife, Bess, had paid a call on Berenson at his Villa I Tatti.

Berenson is quoted by Ernest Samuels, in the second volume of his Berenson biography, as saying: "I have been talking with one of the great historians of the world. I was enchanted by the almost naïve simplicity and shrewd candor of my guest. I rarely enjoyed meeting anyone as I did him." In his diary, he wrote that Truman seemed to him "as unimpressed by high office as if he had got no further than alderman in Independence, Missouri. In my long life I have never met an individual with whom I so instantly felt at home … ready to touch on any subject, no matter how personal." Berenson, who established the canon of Italian Renaissance painting, was ninety-one years old in 1956.

The last of our entries is Eleanor Roosevelt, the first of our First Ladies, as many of us believe, photographed in 1944, presumably in the White House, by Trude Fleischmann, about whom not enough is known. And in one of the happiest pairings, we offer Adlai Stevenson’s tribute to her at the General Assembly of the United Nations in November 1962. (Stevenson, too, appears in the book, in another vivid photograph by George Tames, taken during his unsuccessful but memorable run for the Presidency in 1952, and with an admiring, puzzled look at him by Eric Sevareid, the authoritative television commentator.) Stevenson began his tribute with a figure of speech that has entered the American rhetoric: "She would rather light candles than curse the darkness, and her glow had warmed the world." He went on, with all his notable eloquence, to speak of "the faith in her fellow man and his future which filled the heart of this strong and gentle woman." Eleanor Roosevelt imparted this faith, Stevenson said, "not only to those who knew her, but to the countless men, women, and children in every part of the world who loved her even as she loved them. For she embodied the vision and the will to achieve a world in which men can walk in peace and dignity."