A short life of the author
Lawrence Weschler (born 1952) is an American nonfiction writer whose work defies categorization — part art criticism, part political reportage, part philosophical meditation, part digressive essay — creating a form that is entirely his own. His best books achieve the rare feat of being genuinely surprising on every page, following connections between seemingly unrelated subjects with a passionate curiosity that recalls Walter Benjamin and John Berger.
Life and Career
Weschler spent over twenty years as a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he developed the long-form essay into a vehicle for his eclectic interests. His early work included political reportage from Poland and Latin America, including The Passion of Poland (1984) and A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990), which examined truth and reconciliation processes in Brazil and Uruguay.
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (1982, expanded 2008) was a biography of the Light and Space artist Robert Irwin that became a meditation on perception, consciousness, and the nature of aesthetic experience. The book is considered one of the finest works of art criticism in English.
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995) explored the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles — a real museum that blurs the line between fact and fiction — and used it to investigate the nature of wonder, belief, and the cabinet of curiosities tradition. The book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (2006) was pure Weschler: a collection of essays that traced visual and conceptual convergences across art, history, and culture — a photograph from Abu Ghraib and a Botticelli painting, a Vermeer and a Richter, the shape of a Brancusi and the shape of a bomb.
Key Works
- Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (1982)
- A Miracle, a Universe (1990)
- Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995)
- Everything That Rises (2006)
Collecting Weschler
First editions are modestly priced at $15–$40. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (Pantheon, 1995) is the most collected title. Seeing Is Forgetting has been published in two editions (the expanded 2008 version includes decades of additional material). Weschler’s work is widely taught in art schools and journalism programs.