EDWARD HOPPER AND THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION

Loneliness and quiet desperation pervade these stories and poems inspired by, or reminiscent of, the paintings of Edward Hopper. This volume, whose publication coincides with the opening of a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, includes full-color reproductions of 59 of Hopper's paintings as well as literary contributions from Paul Auster, Grace Paley, William Kennedy, Thom Gunn, and others. Sometimes, as in Leonard Michaels's ``The Nothing That Is Not There,'' one of Hopper's paintings makes an appearance in the narrative, sparking the imaginations of the characters portrayed. In Ann Beattie's ``Cape Cod Evening,'' the characters are drawn from the figures of Hopper's 1939 painting of the same name. Other pieces, Galway Kinnell's poem ``Hitchhiker'' or Norman Mailer's 1940 story ``The Greatest Thing in the World,'' for example, are merely Hopperesque: gritty scenes of American life in the mid-20th century. The book is rounded off with an essay by art historian Gail Levin (CUNY) that discusses, fittingly, Hopper's influence on other contemporary artists.