Jenny Volvovski - The Who, the What, and the When: 65 Artists Illustrate the Secret Sidekicks of History

Thunder is good, thunder is
impressive; but it is lightning
that does the work.
MARK TWAIN

INTRODUCTION AND
COMPILATION COPYRIGHT
2014 by Jenny Volvovski, Julia Rothman, and Matt Lamothe

FOREWORD COPYRIGHT
2014 by Kurt Andersen and Wendy MacNaughton

TEXT COPYRIGHT
2014 by the individual text contributors

ART COPYRIGHT
2014 by the individual artists

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2827-6 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4521-3723-0 (epub, mobi)

Design by ALSO

The text face is Mercury Text, designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones. The titling face is Verne Jules, designed by Isaac Tobin.

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

Foreword

Introduction

Muhammad Alis coach

George Washingtons dentist

Vladimir Nabokovs wife

Lewis and Clarks colleague

Andy Warhols mother

Kamehameha Is wife

Rolling Stones sixth member

Alexander Graham Bells assistant

SOFIE MAGDALENE
(HESSELBERG) DAHL

Roald Dahls mother

CAPTAIN ARTHUR EDWARD
BOY CAPEL

Coco Chanels lover

Alan Turings friend

Harper Lees patrons

Alfred Hitchcocks wife

Earl Tuppers partner

Walt Disneys employee

John Dillingers mentor

P. D. Jamess personal assistant

Giuseppe Verdis wife and muse

Sadaharu Ohs coach

Jerry Siegels father

Marilyn Monroes photographer

GODFREY HAROLD
(G. H.) HARDY

Srinivasa Ramanujans discoverer
and collaborator

Woodrow Wilsons wife

Amelia Earharts husband

The Carter Familys friend and teacher

Le Corbusiers colleague

Charles Bukowskis editor

Harry Callahans wife and model

Salvador Allendes mentor

Fyodor Dostoyevskys wife

Gertrude Ederles coach

John Waynes stuntman

Emily Dickinsons dog

Maurice Sendaks brother

Ernest Shackletons right-hand man

Washington Roeblings wife

Martin Heideggers colleague

Ralph Waldo Emersons aunt

Elvis Presleys mother

Gertrude Steins lover

Antoine Lavoisiers wife

JOSEPH DALTON (J. D.)
HOOKER

Charles Darwins colleague

Vladimir Lenins brother

Marcus Tullius Ciceros secretary

Auguste Rodins muse

Al Capones mentor

Helen Kellers teacher

MARJORIE GREENBLATT
MAZIA GUTHRIE

Woodie Guthries wife

Edgar Allan Poes foster father

Richard Nixons secretary

Tom Thumbs wife

William Morriss collaborator

William Mortons teacher and partner

Margaret Sangers chemist

Sears, Roebuck business partner

Wright Brothers mentor

Alice Waterss mentor

Dirk Nowitzkis coach

Louis Armstrongs benefactor

Robert Ingersolls father

Abraham Lincolns friend

David Thompsons wife

Martin Luther King Jr.s mentor

Francis Crick and
James D. Watsons peer

Vivian Maiers discoverer

Author Bios

Illustrator Bios

Bibliography

Author Index

Illustrator Index

Index

Acknowledgments

WRITTEN BY KURT ANDERSEN
novelist and public radio host

ILLUSTRATED BY WENDY MACNAUGHTON
illustrator and graphic journalist

I jumped at the chance to be part of this book because Ive been fascinated for a long time by one of historys most extraordinary and improbable secret accomplices, a promising young man who signed on as second fiddle to an unpromising young man who became one of the nineteenth centurys most famous and consequential men of all.

At the dawn of industrial capitalism, Friedrich Engels was a tall, handsome capitalist working in his fathers cotton-milling business, helping to manage a factory in Manchester, England. But he had simultaneously turned himself into an anticapitalist, writing articles for radical papers and a book-length expos of the wretched lives of Manchesters mill workers and their families, The Condition of the Working Class in England. (Imagine a modern equivalent: Jamie Dimons kid, say, running a JPMorgan Chase derivatives trading desk while also publishing screeds in The Nation and organizing Occupy Wall Street.)

At twenty-three, Engels befriended a cranky, excitable, scrounging twenty-five-year-old journalist and rabble-rouserMarxand became his lifelong collaborator (The Communist Manifesto, Capital) and patron. And in order to fund his bourgeoisie-loathing BFFs bourgeois lifestyle, Engels kept his lucrative capitalist-tool day job for the next quarter century. Im a fan of Fitzgeralds line about living with contradictionsThe test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to functionbut Engelss life is a gobsmacker.

A plurality of the accomplices here are (like Engels with Marx) men who helped other men, and nearly as many are women (wives, mothers, assistants) who helped men. There are only a handful each of men who helped women and women who helped women. As an academic might say, such is the genderedness of historiography. What an academic might say about a possible lesbian having an animal accompliceEmily Dickinson and her dog CarloLord only knows.

These accomplices are variously mentors, partners, spouses, muses. In my own career, Ive had three unequivocally indispensable enablers. I met them all in my twenties, during my first five years in New York City.

The crucial mentor was Gene Shalit, then the Today shows full-time movie critic and cultural correspondent, who hired me out of college to be his writer (mainly of the daily essays he broadcast on the NBC Radio Network). He created and offered the job, he admitted later, because at our first meeting Id used the word anthropomorphic. As a boss he was perfection: unfailingly cheerful, encouraging and grateful, generous in every possible way. A year or so into my tenure, he signed a contract to produce a book of humorous essays called The Real Thing, and asked me to write it for him. Around Christmas, after Id finished maybe a half dozen of the essays, he called me into his office to announce that hed changed his mind. Instead of being his ghost (and by the way, his companys official name was Scrooge & Marley), the book would have my name and my name alone on the cover. And thus, at age twenty-six, I became a published author.