Mapplethorpe

About this book

Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald immortalized the Roaring '20s, Jack Fritscher captures the essence of the tumultuous '70s. Against a backdrop of riotous pop culture and gay life in America, this uncensored memoir offers a candid view of Robert Mapplethorpe who died of AIDS at age 42. This book is based on the author's detailed journals and Jack Fritscher creates a fresh, fast-paced account that hooks the reader like a page-turning novel. It started when the undiscovered Mapplethorpe flew to San Francisco in 1977 to ask Fritscher, then editor of Drummer magazine, to look at his portfolio. Fritscher, recognizing Mapplethorpe's talent, assigned and supervised his first cover. They later became friends, colleagues, and lovers. Mapplethorpe repeatedly asked Fritscher to write about him. Fritscher responded with features and fiction depicting the photographer. When Fritscher wrote the novel Some Dance to Remember, he dedicated it to Mapplethorpe, who read it in progress. The book was published to wide acclaim after Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. The New Republic named the book a Classic on a peer with Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera is a vivid, compelling story of a specific group at a specific time in a specific place, living in a Golden Age before AIDS and its lost civilization beneath a viral sea.