The Accidental Collector

"Readers who fell in love with The Eighth Lively Art will delight in the stories and profiles that the painter and paleontologist Wesley Wehr has collected in this follow-up to his earlier memoir. Here, Wehr's subjects - the painters, poets, and thinkers whose names constitute a pantheon of Pacific Northwest artistic and intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s - reveal a shared distaste for theorizing about their work, which for them tended to be rather haphazardly integrated into the broader career of living by one's wits. And, more than this trait, all of them in their time shared a moment and a special place in the lens of Wehr's perception, inspiring a question that their lives answered, in different ways, by example: "How does a young person learn what it is to become an artist in the world?"" "The profiles collected in this volume are a mosaic of the voices, episodes, images, and locales that have remained vivid in Wehr's memory. There are the growing pains of a 1940s adolescence, sufferings alternately provoked and soothed by the presence of Mae West, Bela Lugosi, actors Paul Robeson and Diana Barrymore, and other major and minor luminaries, many of whom the young Wehr interviewed for his high school newspaper, after becoming a reporter in order to skip his afternoon classes."--BOOK JACKET.