A short life of the author
Andy Warhol (born Andrew Warhola, 6 August 1928 – 22 February 1987) was an American artist, filmmaker, record producer, and author who was the central figure of the Pop Art movement, the most famous American artist of the second half of the twentieth century, and a figure whose influence on contemporary art, fashion, celebrity culture, and the relationship between commerce and creativity is incalculable. His books and published writings — though secondary to his visual art and films — are fascinating cultural documents that extend his artistic practice into prose: flat, affectless, compulsively observant, and suffused with the same unsettling ambiguity between depth and surface that characterises his silkscreens of soup cans and movie stars.
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975)
Warhol’s most substantial book is a series of monologues, dialogues, and observations on subjects including love, beauty, fame, work, money, success, art, and time. The style is deliberately banal — Warhol discusses his preference for department stores, his habit of eating the same lunch every day, his fascination with television — and the reader is left to decide whether this banality conceals profundity or is simply banality. This uncertainty is the point: Warhol’s genius, in his writing as in his art, lay in making it impossible to tell the difference between depth and surface.
The book contains some of Warhol’s most quoted observations: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes” (though this formulation actually originated elsewhere and was attributed to him); “I am a deeply superficial person”; “I like boring things.”
a: A Novel (1968)
Warhol’s first book is a transcript of twenty-four hours of tape recordings made at the Factory — raw, unedited conversations between Warhol’s associates (principally the “Warhol Superstar” Ondine) recorded on an amphetamine-fueled marathon. The transcripts are full of errors, garbled sentences, overlapping speakers, and long stretches of incoherent monologue. It is simultaneously unreadable and fascinating — a document of the Factory scene’s chaotic energy and a conceptual art project that treats language the way Warhol treated images: as raw material to be reproduced mechanically, without authorial intervention.
POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980)
Co-written with Pat Hackett, POPism is Warhol’s memoir of the 1960s — the decade of the Factory, the Velvet Underground, Edie Sedgwick, the Silver Factory, the assassination attempt by Valerie Solanas, and the transformation of the New York art world. It is the most useful of Warhol’s books for anyone seeking to understand the cultural history of the period, though Warhol’s characteristically detached narration keeps the reader at arm’s length from the events described.
The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989)
Published posthumously, edited by Pat Hackett from Warhol’s daily dictated diary entries from 1976 to 1987, the Diaries are an 800-page chronicle of Warhol’s daily life — his social engagements, his expenditures (he notes the cost of every cab ride), his encounters with celebrities, politicians, and socialites, his observations on art, money, and fame, and his persistent anxieties about health and death. The cumulative effect is extraordinary: a portrait of an era (late-1970s and 1980s New York), a self-portrait of an artist whose genius lay in observation, and a meditation on the surface of American life.
Exposures (1979) and America (1985)
Exposures is a book of Warhol’s photographs of celebrities and socialites — Bianca Jagger, Truman Capote, Liza Minnelli — with brief, witty captions. America is a more ambitious photographic survey of the United States. Both extend Warhol’s artistic practice into the medium of photography.
Warhol as Writer
Warhol’s writing is not literary in any conventional sense. He did not craft sentences or develop arguments. His prose style — flat, affectless, repetitive, superficial — is itself an artistic statement: a refusal of depth, of sincerity, of the traditional literary virtues of introspection and moral seriousness. Whether this refusal constitutes profundity or emptiness remains, like most things about Warhol, a matter of ongoing debate.
Collecting Warhol
a: A Novel (1968, Grove Press) in first edition is highly collectible, bringing $200–$500. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) is affordable. The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989, Warner) is widely available. Books signed by Warhol bring significant premiums. Interview magazine, which Warhol founded, is also collected.