The 2017 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant

The 2017 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant Michael Brenson Philip Gourevitch Pacifique Irankunda Seth Kantner Jay Kirk Meghan O’Rourke George Packer Julie Phillips

The Whiting Foundation recognizes that works of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction are essential to our culture, but come into being at great cost to writers in time and resources. The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant of $40,000 is awarded to writers in the process of completing a work of nonfiction to the highest aesthetic and intellectual level. It is intended to encourage original and ambitious projects by giving its grantees the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition.

The Recipients of the 2017

Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant

Michael Brenson

David Smith and the Transformation of American Sculpture Forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux Biography

“

In the Voltri factories David found a bounty of industrial objects – springs, bolts, nails, hooks, spikes, balls, discs, tongs, calipers, clouds, anvils, and wheels. Some of the objects were, in David’s words, “stopped in progress” or “in varying stages of finish.”

Most were newly obsolete. In photographs they seem expectant even though they radiate an anxiety of rejection, function lost, promise betrayed. David generally lived with scrap metal for a while, letting it “cure,” before using it. In Voltri he had to work fast. He had a month before the show and the survival of the objects was at risk.

One of the factories has the stark grandeur of a pillaged or unfinished Early Christian church. With its huge arched portals and circular windows, the largest factory reminded me of the Baths of Caracalla or of the Roman aqueducts. In these spaces, no one, not even David, was big. How would he move through and settle into them without being overpowered by them? How could he do enough, make enough, be enough, to respond to the expectancies of an infinity of abandoned things? How would he contend with such quantities of history and desire?

He drew outlines on floors with chalk and arranged objects on the floor before raising them up and tack welding them to examine them upright. Some objects he changed, others he incorporated intact. What the object had been intended for seems a trace that can feel almost excruciating in its immediacy. At some point the sculptures would be moved outside, where they had to hold their own amid other industrial remnants.

For David the associations were overwhelming. Tracks reaching into the heart of the factory complexes evoked for him images of tracks along which enemies of the German state were deposited into concentration camps. “I felt the awe and the scared air, like one returning survivor after holocaust, and as I had felt, very young in Decatur, when I went through the window in my first abandoned factory.”

”

Judges’ citation: Art critic, scholar, and curator Michael Brenson has devoted years to the volcanic life and work of the sculptor regarded as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Mining essential material that he alone has had access to and making use of his own acute awareness of the political, social, and cultural history of the time, Brenson has constructed a vibrant map of a largerthan-life artist’s trajectory, his fertile connections and friendships, his volatile relationships, his passion for art, artists, and work. Brenson’s vividly colorful, scrupulously reported account is the first biography of Smith, who died in a car accident at the age of 59 at the height of his powers. In this intensely felt, brilliantly detailed exploration, Brenson aims, as he writes, “to document the essential flows and leaps of [that] extraordinary artistic creativity.”

The project: During his life and for many years after his death in 1965, David Smith was widely considered America’s greatest sculptor. While he remains a canonical figure, the tradition of welded steel sculpture that he was instrumental in developing can seem as obsolete as the image of the heroic hyper-masculine individualist with which he is often typecast. The richness and complexity of Smith’s art are, however, astonishing. He worked across media and disciplines.

He saw an object in six different ways at once and imagined sculpture as a metaphor of a metaphor of a metaphor. He transformed sculpture into a field that embraced not just painting and drawing but also engraving, photography, and even film.

Michael Brenson was an art critic for The New York Times and has curated exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the SculptureCenter. He has organized and moderated conferences or panels at the National Gallery of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Chazen Museum of Art, the Rockefeller Foundation, and New York’s Jewish Museum. He has been a Getty scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, Bogliasco Fellow, and Clark Fellow. He is a member of the sculpture faculty in Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and a Visiting Senior Critic in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design’s Department of Fine Arts. He lives in Accord, NY.

Philip Gourevitch

You Hide That You Hate Me And I Hide That I Know Forthcoming from Penguin Press Political reportage/History

“

Calixte said it was still too soon for him to trust even the friendliest, most innocent of his childhood neighbors — the people, he said, “who did nothing against us and, when there were killings, used to come and help us bury bodies.” He said, “They act like they love us, but I can’t tell.”

He believed that coexistence would take several generations. While his generation was too young to be guilty of genocide, those whose families had killed while his family was killed also still carried a heavy burden of memory. “They have that heart of shame,” Calixte said. “They don’t feel free when we are together.”

That was “the danger,” he said: “Those who really manage to talk to us say, No, don’t lie to us, don’t say that you don’t hate us, because we know better. They say, Why do you hide it? They don’t believe us. But really we hide nothing. We really don’t hate them.”

At first it pained Calixte to have his good will met with such alienation and disbelief. But he recognized the sentiment — “They can’t trust us as we can’t trust them,” he said — and, in time, he had been surprised to find that accepting the limits of reconciliation could be a measure of respect.

One of his classmates at university had been one of his boyhood neighbors, a son of one of the families that had wiped out his family. At school, they got along socially.

They could drink together, and talk, and share food. But if Calixte ever brought up the past, he couldn’t get anywhere.

“He would tell me, You are not honest, because you can’t say that you hate me.

My family, to which I belong, killed yours. Our blood – even mine – killed yours. So how can you hide that you hate me?

“Then what he told me was very interesting,” Calixte said. “He said, We’re at school. We have the same life, we have so many things that we share, and you need me here on campus as I need you. So let’s just share those interests, but don’t go beyond.

Don’t ask me about my family. Don’t ask me about my home. No, let’s just talk here

about here. Let’s talk about the syllabus, let’s talk about research, let’s talk about football. But let’s don’t get involved in those issues. Because I know that you’re not telling me honestly the truth that you have in your heart.”

Calixte laughed. He sounded excited, as if in shutting him out, his boyhood neighbor was really letting him in on something.

Judges’ citation:

”

Elegantly written, extraordinarily well conceived, and lacerating. In a series of searching encounters with Rwandans, Tutsi and Hutu, survivors and perpetrators, consummate journalist Philip Gourevitch listens, questions, and discovers in the visceral stories of the people he meets how a murderer lives side by side with the close relatives of the people he killed. It would be easy to romanticize the attempt to embrace the concept of forgiveness in a legalized framework, but Gourevitch scrupulously avoids such pitfalls. He is writing a book that goes far beyond political analysis to raise the profoundest questions about what it is to be a human being.

The project: Twenty years ago, Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families inscribed the Rwandan genocide in the public consciousness as one of the defining ordeals of humankind, telling how a nation hacked itself to pieces — a million people murdered by their compatriots in a hundred days — and the rest of the world did nothing to stop it. Now, on the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the slaughter, Gourevitch revisits Rwanda to tell the even more confounding story of how that nation has been putting itself back together. The book draws on years of intensive reporting to explore a society where killers and survivors live again as neighbors, reckoning with the individual and collective inheritance of humanity divided and betrayed—an intimate multigenerational chronicle of memory and forgetting and the seemingly impossible demands of forgiveness.

Philip Gourevitch is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and the former editor of The Paris Review. His book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the George Polk Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan Award, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and The Guardian First Book Award. He is also the author of A Cold Case and Standard Operating Procedure: The Ballad of Abu Ghraib. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Pacifique Irankunda

The Times of Stories Forthcoming from Random House Memoir/History

“

There was a time when silence reigned all over my village. Rivers were loud, but their rhythmic sounds were part of the silence. People worked in their fields with hoes. There were no cars, no factories. I imagine that to Westerners that time and place would have resembled the Stone Age. Planes flew over the village, but never more than once a week.

There was another season that broke this silence. It was the time of crops growing. From the early stage of the seeds’ sprouting, parents would send their kids into the fields to make noise and chase away the birds that ate the seedlings. This went on for a month, and after that the silence would come again. I enjoyed the quiet, but it did not last. Another season erupted and broke all the silence. It was the season of war. It came in the fall when I was four, and it lasted for more than a decade.

In this new season, just as in any other, some things died and others were born. Everything was transformed. When the militia attacked a village, it left behind the remains of the dead—people and animals—and the houses in ruin.

People moved from their houses to live in the forests. New words appeared— ibinywamaraso (“the blood drinkers”) and ivyamfurambi (“deeds of the wrong first born”)—and new expressions: kamwe kamwe ku ruyeye ku rwembe (“one after another, gently on a razor”). This slogan and others like it said not to worry if you did not kill many people. The secret was to keep killing.

This new season made children my age wish they had been born blind and deaf so they couldn’t see their houses being burned and their mothers being raped before being killed, or hear the sounds of bombs or their parents screaming and crying. But at other times, you wished you had the eyes of a hawk and the ears of a deer, so that you could distinguish, in the dark, a black stump with branches from a man dressed in black pointing a gun, or a thin string tied to a mine from a long blade of grass lying across your path. These were times when you needed to know that the sound of raindrops falling on leaves wasn’t that of militiamen approaching on tiptoes. For a while you wished for something, and after another while you wished for the opposite. You learned to cover your eyes in the day; you learned to see in the dark.

”

Judges’ citation: A radical innocence infuses this luminous, beautifully wrought narrative of growing up amidst the violence of civil war. What surety of writing! And not just in the poetic beauty of individual sentences, but also in the mature control of the book’s structure. Despite the complexity of what Pacifique Irankunda has lived through, his voice is direct, the stories like pure running water on the page. As a child, this young Tutsi listened, rapt, to the stories the elders told before the oral tradition of thousands of years, already under threat from the encroachment of colonialization, was wiped out by war. In his peerless testimony, as transparent as it is true, he brings the reader into the deep waters of genocide, diaspora, and the refugee experience. This will be recognized as one of the most astonishing debuts of a generation.

The project: In the East African nation of Burundi, civil war raged for more than a decade between the Hutu and the Tutsi. In creating a portrait of his life, his family, and his childhood experiences during this long war, the author’s personal narrative intersects with the larger currents of history. It is layered with his perspective of living in America for eight years, finding this new home both a privilege and a source of longing and pain. The book is at once a testament to the enduring traditions of Burundian culture, and a deeply researched investigation of the country’s political and cultural history, from the effects of colonial exploitation to the recent conflict. The story of resilience, diaspora, and the refugee experience is also the intimate story of a family, and of a young man making sense of what remains.

Pacifique Irankunda was born in Burundi and came to America at the age of 19 as a scholarship student at Deerfield Academy. His first published work, “Playing at Violence,” appeared in The American Scholar and won a 2015 Pushcart Prize.

He graduated from Williams College in 2013 with a degree in psychology and political science. He lives in Williamstown, MA.

Seth Kantner

A Thousand Trails Home Forthcoming from Mountaineers Books Cultural history/Nature writing

“

Our sod igloo was small and low, the way sod homes were constructed for warmth—twelve or fourteen feet across the floor and maybe six feet tall in the middle. Above us, from the peeled poles of the ceiling hung horizontal rows of cotton string, blackened with dried blood. There my mom hung strips of meat to dry. The meat darkened until it was ready to turn on the strings. When the strips were dry enough to keep, she’d stuff them into cloth flour sacks to store outside in our log cache. Then my dad would slice more for her to hang. All winter meat hung drying. Bags and bags of dried caribou went into the cache — for lunches all winter, for making into pemmican to eat out on the trail, and for snacks all summer when there was no cold for a freezer and no caribou on this land.

Tucked in where the small poles of the roof crossed the eave beam were long sheets of sinew, peeled from the backs of caribou carcasses. Dried, they curled, stiff and translucent and faintly yellow, ready to strip and use as thread for skin-sewing projects. On our beds were caribou hides, soft and warm, and giving off extra warmth and comfort in some nameless yet familiar way. Across the tunnel entrance to the outside world were more hides. Around our tiny home were household items made from caribou parts—parkas and mukluks and mittens, hide hinges, caribou skin weather-stripping, antler handles on awls and knives and saws and pot lids. Cushions on the floor and stump seats were made from circles of thick-haired caribou hide sewn together, skin-out. In the corner hanging from a wooden peg was our Thermos, in its huge fur tube, caribou hide sewed skin-out into a sleeve as big around as a stovepipe, for extra insulation during cold-weather travel.

The few store-bought items we owned were protected, saved, and guarded by the harsh actuality of shortage. Caribou skins were the one material we knew no dearth of. We could hardly imagine a life without all the caribou skins a person might need.

”

Judges’ citation: An arresting, urgent portrait of the declining Western Arctic caribou herd and of the Inupiat Eskimos, whose lives are bound up together. With lyrical, precise descriptions of the natural world, Seth Kantner captures a rapidly changing place at a fraught historical moment, embodying issues affecting the whole planet. Kantner is about to take his place among the greatest nature writers of his or indeed any generation. He succeeds in what we hope for from any writer, whether of fiction or nonfiction: through the agency of words alone, he enlarges our experience of the world.

The project: A first-person account of a life spent hunting, studying, and living alongside caribou, A Thousand Trails Home encompasses the historical past and the present day, revealing the fragile and intertwined lives of people and animals surviving on an uncertain landscape of rapid cultural and climatic change sweeping the Alaskan Arctic.

Seth Kantner was born and raised in the wilderness of northern Alaska. He has worked as a trapper, fisherman, gardener, mechanic, igloo builder, and adjunct professor. He is a Whiting Award winner in Fiction, a Milkweed National Fiction Prize winner, and his debut novel Ordinary Wolves won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Fiction. He followed it with a memoir, Shopping for Porcupine, and a collection of essays, Swallowed by the Great Land. His writing and wildlife photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, Outside, and other publications, and he is a columnist for Alaska Dispatch News and other newspapers. He lives in various places in Northwest Alaska.

Jay Kirk

Avoid the Day Forthcoming from Harper Perennial Biography/Memoir

“

Inside another case we regard Bartók’s cufflinks, stamps, a well-worn pocket metronome. If you read accounts by his students, you quickly learn how he put tempo, almost cruelly, above all else. He demanded a precision impossible to duplicate and would shame those who could not master it.

Whereas some composers leave tempo at least somewhat up to later generations for interpretation, Bartók’s scores strictly dictate exactly how each note should register in time. On the autograph manuscript of his Third Quartet, he designated that each quarter note must be equal to 88 beats per minute, then changes it twenty short bars later to 76 BPM. A very subtle shift.

We wander over to a roped-off room. It is the master’s studio. There is his coffin, black and shellacked. Did I say coffin? I meant piano. The track-lighting sends streams, like rivulets of thawing ice, dribbling across the lid. The room is otherwise sparse. The window is like any window. But the only thing of interest to me is the machine on the desk in the far corner.

“Is that the actual phonograph he collected with?” I say, sticking my head into the room past the velvet rope.

“NO NO NO.” “Don’t lean over it,” Bob says. “They’ve got a sensitized alarm system.”

I am drawn to it like a winter moth. The thing is, it was this machine, more than anything else, that allowed Bartók to become Bartók. His whole method relied on this advantage: to go out into the world, collect bits of direct experience, make faithful transcriptions, then feed it to his inner gargoyle.

But it wasn’t until the summer of 1904, while Bartók was at a resort in Gerliceputsza, that he would overhear a nanny cooing a lullaby and discover his

true master. One day, while composing, he was interrupted by this voice from the next room over. At first it must have perturbed him immensely. He was always fanatical about working in absolute silence. In his studio, he muted out his noisy family with a thick leather blanket. In exile in New York, many years later, he would leave the shower running as a kind of white noise machine. But now, he set down his pen and sought out the girl. Surely, she was flustered, faced by this fanatical wraith of a man, demanding to know what it was she was singing.

Somehow Bartók found the courtesy and charm to persuade her to sing it again so he might copy it down in his journal. The song was about an apple that had fallen in the mud. It really could not have been simpler. Bartók looked at it there, this apple in the dark mud, like a shining clot of blood, and he picked it up, and turned it this way and that, and he scribbled down the melody to better understand the shape of this thing which he could not yet grasp.

Judges’ citation:

”

A thrilling, eccentric journey through time and space, art and music. Kirk is the fresh and iconoclastic voice the classical music world didn’t even know it needed. He is a wonderfully flamboyant presence in this fluid narrative, unfurling indelible meditations on the nature of grief and experience. Avoid the Day is a courageous experiment in hypersubjectivity. At times laugh-out-loud funny, at other times deeply moving, this is prestissimo biographical writing that pushes the boundaries of what nonfiction can do.

The project: Avoid the Day is a grief memoir married to a detective story married to a meditation on the mutable nature of experience; it investigates the mystery of Bela Bartók’s Third String Quartet and its lost autograph manuscript, chronicling the author’s travels from Transylvania to the North Pole in search of an answer while refusing to face the imminent death of his father.

Jay Kirk is the author of the book Kingdom Under Glass, the adventures of legendary explorer and taxidermist Carl Akeley. His work has appeared in Harper’s, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation, and has been anthologized in Best American Crime Writing 2003 and 2004, Best American Travel Writing 2009 (edited by Simon Winchester), and Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person From Harper’s Magazine (edited by Bill Wasik). He is a recipient of a 2005 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and is a MacDowell Fellow. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Meghan O’Rourke

What’s Wrong With Me? The Mysteries of Chronic Illness Forthcoming from Riverhead Books Cultural reportage/Memoir

“

A common symptom of autoimmune diseases is debilitating fatigue.

Complaining of fatigue sounds like moral weakness; in New York City, tired is normal. But the fatigue of immune dysfunction is as different from normal sleep deprivation as Ebola is from the common cold. It’s not caused by needing sleep, but by the body’s cellular conviction that it needs to conserve energy in order to fix whatever is wrong. The feeling is so strong it erases your will, the very sense of youness that drives most of us through our days. The worst part of my fatigue, the one I couldn’t explain to anyone—I knew I’d seem crazy—was the loss of an intact sense of self. It wasn’t just that I suffered brain fog (a common autoimmune symptom); and it wasn’t just the “loss of self” that sociologists talk about in connection with chronic illness, where everything you know about yourself disappears, and you have to build a different life. It was that I no longer had the sense that I was a distinct person. Taking the subway to NYU, where I taught, I felt like a mechanism that moved arduously through the world, simply trying to complete its tasks. Sitting upright at my father’s birthday dinner required a huge act of will. Normally, absorption in a task—an immersive flow—can lead you to forget that you feel sick, but my fatigue made such a state impossible.

To be sick in this way is to have the unpleasant feeling that you are impersonating yourself. When you’re sick, the act of living is more act than living.

Healthy people, as you’re painfully aware, have the luxury of forgetting that our existence depends on a cascade of precise cellular interactions. Not you.

The hardest part was not being comprehended—or even not believed. I didn’t feel I had any language I could use to explain what was happening to me. “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it,” writes Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain. Fatigue does the same. What’s notable about both fatigue and pain is that these are subjective symptoms, unlike fever or a broken bone. It is challenging to measure them. “To have pain is to have certainty,” Scarry writes.

“To hear about pain is to have doubt.” So unreal is the pain of others that the

national conversation about painkillers focuses almost exclusively on the problems of addiction (which are horrific), and rarely on the trauma of having one’s pain undertreated (as it often still is, with devastating consequences).

Likewise, Virginia Woolf testified, “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache….

The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

Today it’s hard to recall exactly what it felt like, but in those first months— really, the whole year—everything began to feel like a threat.

Judges’ citation:

”

In this high-risk, high-reward project, Meghan O’Rourke writes of her experiences at the frontier of medical knowledge as an explorer might. Even in a now well-established genre of illness memoir, O’Rourke’s voice stands out for its power and originality. As far-reaching and ambitious as it is deeply personal, the book probes the still poorly understood science and cultural experience of autoimmune disease. It is a shape-shifting fusion of memoir and reportage written with wit and a poet’s grace.

The project: A blend of memoir and sociocultural criticism examining the rise of autoimmune disease in the United States and other industrialized nations, What’s Wrong With Me? will anatomize the shadowy experience of living with chronic illnesses that are poorly understood; it is both an account of the complexities of illness and a philosophical, literary, and sociological examination of questions that a phenomenon like autoimmunity poses.

Meghan O’Rourke was an editor for The New Yorker, the culture editor and literary critic for Slate, and poetry editor for The Paris Review. Her work has appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Best American Poetry, among others. She is the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye and the poetry collections Once, Halflife, a finalist for the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain’s Forward First Book Prize, and the justpublished Sun in Days. She was awarded the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism. She has taught at Princeton, The New School, and New York University. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, and Marfa, TX.

George Packer

Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century Forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf Political history/Biography

“

The light in his dilated pupils told you that his intelligence was always awake and working. His eyes captured nearly everything and gave almost nothing away. Like oneway mirrors, they looked outward, not inward. I never knew anyone quicker to size up a room, an adversary, a newspaper article, a set of variables in a complex situation— even his own imminent death. The ceaseless sizing up told of a manic spirit churning somewhere within the low voice and languid limbs. Once, in the 1980s, he was walking down Madison Avenue when an acquaintance passed him and called out: “How are you, Dick?” Holbrooke watched the man go by, then turned to his companion. “What do you think he meant by that?” Yes, his curly hair never obeyed the comb, and his suit always looked rumpled, and he couldn’t stay off the phone or TV, and he kept losing things, and he ate as much food as fast as he could, once slicing open the tip of his nose on a cherrystone clamshell and bleeding through several cloth napkins—yes, he was in almost every way a disorderly presence. But his eyes never lost focus.

I’m trying to think what to tell you, now that you have me talking. There’s too much to say and it all comes crowding in at once. His ambition, his loyalty, his cruelty, his fragility, his betrayals, his wounds, his wives, his girlfriends, his sons, his lunches.

By dying he stood up a hundred people, including me. He could not be alone. He might have had to think about himself.

So much thought, so little inwardness. Maybe that was something he couldn’t afford. Les Gelb, Holbrooke’s friend of forty-five years and daily recipient of multiple phone calls, would butt into a monologue and ask, “What’s Obama like?” Holbrooke would give a brilliant analysis of the President. “How do you think you affect Obama?” Holbrooke had nothing to say. Where did it come from, that blind spot behind his eyes that masked his inner life? It was a great advantage over the rest of us, because the propulsion from idea into action was never broken by self-scrutiny. It was also a great vulnerability, and finally, it was fatal.

”

Judges’ citation: Irreverent, fast-paced, and unfailingly rigorous, this is nonfiction writing that breaks new ground. In choosing to relate the staunchly accurate biography of an “almost-great man” from the point of view of a fictional narrator, George Packer has given himself many degrees of freedom not usually available to an authorized biographer. This masterly account reads like a literary novel of the highest order while providing an insightful look into the deeper nature of power and the lives of those who hold it. Packer realized that to tell the story of this giant of diplomacy, whose diaries reflect his involvement in three wars, was also to draw a map of our successes and failures. As Holbrooke, so America. He has created an enthralling nonfiction picaresque that offers incisive clues to the complexities this country faces today.

The project: This book recounts the life of the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke and, especially, the three wars in which he was deeply involved—Vietnam at the start of his career, Bosnia at its height, and Afghanistan at its end. Using a fictional narrator to tell a strictly factual account, drawing on exclusive access to Holbrooke’s rich personal papers, the book provides an intimate character study of idealism and egotism, humanitarian purpose and self-blindness, to trace the waxing and waning of America’s democratic health and global leadership during the later years of what’s called the American Century.

George Packer has been a New Yorker staff writer since 2003. His book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by the New York Times, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award. He has contributed numerous articles, essays, and reviews to The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Harper’s, and other publications. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and has taught writing at Harvard, Bennington, and Columbia. His most recent book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, won the National Book Award.

He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Julie Phillips

The Baby on the Fire Escape Forthcoming from W.W. Norton Biography/Cultural history

“

A hazard of motherhood in any creative life is that the momentum of success that carries you through the first years may start to fade, and isolation and discouragement set in. Painting careers often grow slowly and flourish late. A painter needs to produce a whole body of work, into which she may invest years without ever knowing whether she will succeed. Young artists who arrived in New York full of excitement, one writer mused, “knew nothing of the long times of defeat, the dead spells, the savage bite of poverty in middle age.” Living slightly outside the art community, neither a fresh face nor an established figure, in her forties Alice Neel saw her career begin to stall.

A warning sign came in 1944, when Life magazine reported that the government was selling paintings acquired by the Federal Art Project as scrap canvas for four cents a pound. The Life article was illustrated with several discarded paintings, one of which was Alice’s. She managed to buy a few canvases back from a Canal Street junk dealer, but the bulk of the Art Project paintings—some of which would be worth millions on today’s market—were discarded or destroyed. Social realism was on its way out, partly because, in the conservative postwar atmosphere, anything connected to communism was suspect in America. In the new, nonrepresentational style of “action painting,” the painting was no longer “about” anything; instead the canvas was “an arena in which to act,” the picture the product of a series of heroic gestures. In 1951 Neel had two one-woman exhibitions, but the really important event of that year was the one she wasn’t in. The Ninth Street Show was the first major display of abstract expressionist painting, including work by Pollock, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, and many other artists of what became known as the New York School. Abstraction was about to sweep New York off

its feet and figurative painting out the door. From now until 1960 Alice had only one more show.

“I’m not against abstraction,” Alice later said. “What I can’t stand is that the abstractionists pushed all the other pushcarts off the street.” In fact critics have pointed out the pure painterly quality of Neel’s work, the decisiveness of her brushstrokes, the inventiveness of her forms—all qualities associated with abstract painting. More and more, though, she dedicated herself to the conservative genre of the portrait. In her situation it may have been a wise strategy. One way for a woman to achieve prominence is to choose an unpopular field and make it her own. Otherwise competition for status may sap her energy; or, attempting to take the lead, she may find herself in the margins. The low status of the portrait in the 1950s gave Neel an extraordinary freedom to explore and master the genre—and that in turn helped her achieve both control and a wild originality.

”

Judges’ citation: Julie Phillips searches for a new understanding of what she calls “the unreported spaces of motherhood” through the biographies of six wildly talented women creators. With her own undeniable artistry, Phillips has wrought her subjects into facets of a single, urgent project. She is an ambitious and elegant writer with a fierce passion to explore the split between work and parenting. The empathy, insight, and sheer amount of research that have gone into this project are staggering. The Baby on the Fire Escape is an assured work of social history, art history, and feminist theory written in unfailingly vivid and gripping prose.

The project: The Baby on the Fire Escape uses biography to explore questions of maternal subjectivity and creative work. Lively essays on twentieth-century artists and writers – Alice Neel, Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Sontag, Angela Carter, and Alice Walker – leap the gaps between work and mothering and explore new models for a creative life. A segment of the Le Guin chapter appeared as a profile in The New Yorker in 2016.

Julie Phillips is a critic and biographer whose book James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She currently lives with her husband and two children in Amsterdam, where she is a book critic for the daily newspaper Trouw. She also contributes to the arts magazine 4Columns.

Whiting Foundation Trustees and Officers Peter Pennoyer, President John N. Irwin III, Treasurer Amanda Foreman Kumar Mahadeva Kate Douglas Torrey Magdalena ZavalĂ­a, Secretary

Trustees Emeriti Antonia M. Grumbach Robert M. Pennoyer

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