Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis
Timothy Egan, 2012
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780618969029
Summary
How a lone man’s epic obsession led to one of America’s greatest cultural treasures: Prizewinning writer Timothy Egan tells the riveting, cinematic story behind the most famous photographs in Native American history—and the driven, brilliant man who made them.
Edward Curtis was charismatic, handsome, a passionate mountaineer, and a famous photographer, the Annie Leibovitz of his time. He moved in rarefied circles, a friend to presidents, vaudeville stars, leading thinkers. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his Great Idea: to capture on film the continent’s original inhabitants before the old ways disappeared.
An Indiana Jones with a camera, Curtis spent the next three decades traveling from the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the Acoma on a high mesa in New Mexico to the Salish in the rugged Northwest rain forest, documenting the stories and rituals of more than eighty tribes. It took tremendous perseverance — ten years alone to persuade the Hopi to allow him into their Snake Dance ceremony. And the undertaking changed him profoundly, from detached observer to outraged advocate. Eventually Curtis took more than 40,000 photographs, preserved 10,000 audio recordings, and is credited with making the first narrative documentary film. In the process, the charming rogue with the grade school education created the most definitive archive of the American Indian.
His most powerful backer was Theodore Roosevelt, and his patron was J. P. Morgan. Despite the friends in high places, he was always broke and often disparaged as an upstart in pursuit of an impossible dream. He completed his masterwork in 1930, when he published the last of the twenty volumes. A nation in the grips of the Depression ignored it. But today rare Curtis photogravures bring high prices at auction, and he is hailed as a visionary. In the end he fulfilled his promise: He made the Indians live forever. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Born—November 8, 1954
• Where—Seattle, Washington, USA
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize, Journalism (2001); National Book
Award, Nonfiction; Washington State Book Award (twice)
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington
Timothy Egan is an American Pulitzer Prize winning author who resides in Seattle, Washington. He currently contributes opinion columns to the New York Times as the paper's Pacific Northwest correspondent. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his contribution to the series "How Race is Lived in America."
In addition to his work with the New York Times, he has written six books, including The Good Rain (Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, 1991), Breaking Blue, and Lasso the Wind.
The Worst Hard Time is his non-fiction account of those who lived through The Great Depression's Dust Bowl, for which he won the 2006 Washington State Book Award in history/biography and a 2006 National Book Award.
In 2009 he wrote The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, which details the Great Fire of 1910 that burned about three million acres (12,000 km²) and helped shape the United States Forest Service. The book also details some of the political issues of the time focusing on Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. Egan won a second Washington State Book Award in history/biography in 2010 for this work, and a second Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.
In 2012 Egan published a biography of Western and Native American photographer, Edward Curtis: Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Edward Curtis deserves to be remembered as the American artist who racked up the most miles. Traveling by rail, wagon and foot, he undertook a project that struck observers as ambitious and possibly insane. His goal, he said, was to salvage a heritage from oblivion, to document all the tribes in North America that were still intact.... Timothy Egan offers a stirring and affectionate portrait of an underknown figure...[though] the book at times reads less like a thoughtful biography than a sentimental adventure story for boys.
Deborah Solomon - New York Times Book Review
Egan's account of Curtis's life is not so much a traditional biography as a vivid exploration of one man's lifelong obsession with an idea.... Curtis, who died in poverty and obscurity in 1952, qualifies as a Western desperado of a type we don't often hear about. Egan's spirited biography might just bring him the recognition that eluded him in life.
Gary Krist - Washington Post
An obsessive genius neglects his personal life and business matters to pursue a great white whale. It's a familiar tale and the essential narrative of Egan's terrific biography.... Egan fills his chronicle with bright turns of phrase and radiant descriptions.... A sweeping tale about two vanishing ways of life.
Wall Street Journal
Egan here offers a carefully researched portrait of the man the Indians called the “Shadow Catcher.” Evenhanded and free of conjecture, Egan’s narrative traces the career of the 6-foot-2 mountaineer with the Vandyke beard who was born in 1868 and scrabbled from poverty to prominence in Seattle with his camera, along the way rubbing elbows with scientists, presidents, and titans of commerce, before fading into near oblivion before his death in 1952. Egan takes a neutral stance toward Curtis’s sometime manipulations of his subjects’ costumes and rituals. But it’s clear his sympathies lie with the audacious creator of the arresting images of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, the aging Apache Geronimo, Navajo horsemen diminutive against the towering cliffs of the Canyon de Chelly, Hopi maidens with their hair in squash blossom swirls, and some 40,000 more that are his legacy.
Kathryn Lang - Boston Globe
Portrait photographer, so well respected that President Theodore Roosevelt chose him to photograph his daughter’s wedding. Yet in 1900, at the height of his fame, Curtis gave it up to pursue what would become his life’s work—“a plan to photograph all the intact Native American tribes left in North America” before their ways of life disappeared. This idea received the backing of J.P. Morgan and culminated in a critically acclaimed 20-volume set, The North American Indian, which took Curtis 30 years to complete and left him divorced and destitute. Unfailingly sympathetic to his subject, Egan shadows Curtis as he travels from Roosevelt’s summer home at Sagamore Hill to the mesas and canyons of the Southwest tribes and to the rain forests of the Coastal Indians and the isolated tundra on Nunivak Island. Egan portrays the dwindling tribes, their sacred rites (such as the Hopi snake dance), customs, and daily lives, and captures a larger-than-life cast. With a reporter’s eye for detail, Egan delivers a gracefully written biography and adventure story.
Publishers Weekly
Edward Curtis's photographs have been controversial since their rediscovery in the 1970s.... Most damaging to his reputation and his financing efforts was his claim, based on eyewitness accounts, that Gen. George Armstrong Custer's actions at the Battle of the Little Big Horn were not heroic, but in fact cowardly. Egan seeks to restore Curtis to a deserved high reputation. Verdict: This fascinating biography is recommended to readers interested in the American West from the late 19th through early 20th century. —John Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY
Library Journal
New York Times Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Egan (The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, 2009, etc.) returns with the story of the astonishing life of Edward Curtis (1868–1952), whose photographs of American Indians now command impressive prices at auction. This is an era of excessive subtitles--but not this one: "Epic" and "immortal" are words most fitting for Curtis, whose 20-volume The North American Indian, a project that consumed most of his productive adult life, is a work of astonishing beauty and almost incomprehensible devotion..... Lucent prose illuminates a man obscured for years in history's shadows
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher:
1. Egan chooses to use the word "epic" in his subtitle. What does epic mean—and in what way does it apply to the life of Edward Curtis?
2. What do you think of Curtis? What kind of man was he—as a husband, father, artist, advocate, and public figure? Do you think of him as delusional...driven...or visionary?
3. Why did Curtis consider George Custer of the Little Big Horn battle a coward?
4. How does Egan present the West of Curtis's time and before? Is the author's portrait of the past realistic...or idealistic? In what way has the historical West vanished?
5. Do Curtis's photographs, sometimes doctored, reflect an authentic Native American culture? What about the alarm clock he removed from one of his photos, for instance? Or was Curtis striving for something mythic rather than authentic?
6. What made Curtis a controversial figure in his day?
7. How would you describe the Anglo/European Americans attitude toward the Native Americans during Curtis's era? How have those attitudes changed...and what changed them?
8. Egan writes of Curtis:
And just what made a dropout from a one-room schoolhouse think he could get the nation’s top ethnologists to back his project? Balls. Those who didn’t try for the highest peak were doomed to the foothills.
Some critics contend that Egan is too close to his subject and that his book "reads less like a thoughtful biography than a sentimental adventure story for boys." Do you agree or disagree with that statement by New York Times reviewer, Deborah Soloman (see above)?
9. What have you learned about Edward Curtis and/or Native American history after reading Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher? What did you find most surprising—or struck you as particularly interesting—in this book?
10. A fine book to pair this with is Marianne Wiggin's 2007 The Shadow Catcher, a fictionalized biography of Curtis written from the perspective of his wife, Clara. The book was a National Book Award finalist.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)