Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis

By Timothy Egan
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hardcover, 9780618969029, 384pp.)

Publication Date: October 9, 2012

Other Editions of This Title: Paperback, Compact Disc, MP3 CD, Paperback, Paperback

Categories: United States - General, Adventurers & Explorers, Artists, Architects, Photographers

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TIMOTHY EGAN is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and the author of six books, most recently The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Washington State Book Award. His previous books include The Worst Hard Time, which won a National Book Award and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. He is an online op-ed columnist for the New York Times, writing his "Opinionator" feature once a week.He is a third-generation Westerner and lives in Seattle.

　

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"In this hauntingly beautiful book, Egan brings Curtis to life as vividly and with as much depth, heart and understanding as Curtis himself put into his timeless portraits. This is a story for the ages."

--Candice Millard, author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic

"Short Nights is not only the marvelous and rollicking account of life of one of America's extraordinary photographers. It is also a book about the extreme personal cost of outsized ambition. Edward Curtis undertook one of the most epic cultural projects in American history--photographing and documenting the vanishing ways of life of some eighty American Indian tribes. It cost him almost everything he once was. And still he persisted, turning out some of the greatest photographic and ethnological work ever done. Egan has found yet another great subject, and has crafted yet another great narrative around it."

-- S.C. Gwynne, author of Empire of the Summer Moon Edward Curtis’s hauntingly beautiful photographs have graced gallery walls and coffee tables for generations—and his work remains essential to our conception of the American West. Now, in this extraordinary biography, Tim Egan has deftly captured the man behind the images, revealing a great American adventurer who lived at the fragile, fertile intersection of history, anthropology, and art.

--Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder