Knopf imprint: 1739 books

Robert Hughes, who has stunned us with comprehensive works on subjects as sweeping and complex as the history of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the modern art movement (The Shock of the New), the nature of American art (American Visions), and the nature of America itself as seen through its art (The...

From the best-selling author of Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside, a big-hearted memoir told in three parts: about growing up in the wake of the destructive choices of an extremely unconventional mother. Glen David Gold was raised rich, briefly, in southern California at the end of the go-go...

From the late editor, writer, and critic, one of the great chroniclers of the art, fashion, and celebrity scenes: an expansive collection of thirty-five essays that offer an intimate look into the worlds of some of the most important and well-known artists, designers, and actors of our time. For...

Nicholas Fox Weber, author of the acclaimed Patron Saints (“Exhilarating avant-garde entertainment”—Sam Hunter, The New York Times Book Review) and Balthus (“The authoritative account of his life and work”—Michael Ravitch, Newsday), gives us now the idiosyncratic lives of Sterling and...

From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present. As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed...

Drawing on previously unpublished sources, this groundbreaking biography of Robert Schumann sheds new light on the great composer’s life and work. With the rigorous research of a scholar and the eloquent prose of a novelist, Judith Chernaik takes us into Schumann’s nineteenth-century Romantic...

A beautifully written and original biography of one of the greatest and most popular of modern composers--which also deeply investigates his much-loved music. Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was that rare creature, a composer who reinvented the language of music without alienating the majority of...

John Cage was a man of extraordinary and seemingly limitless talents: musician, inventor, composer, poet. He became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Now award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives...

The iconic French singer comes to life in this enthralling, definitive biography, which captures Edith Piaf’s immense charisma along with the time and place that gave rise to her unprecedented international career. Raised by turns in a brothel, a circus caravan, and a working-class Paris...

The emergence of Russian classical music in the nineteenth century in the wake of Mikhail Glinka comprises one of the most remarkable and fascinating stories in all musical history. The five men who came together in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg in the 1860s, all composers of talent, some...

From the jumping rock and blues joints of the 1950s to Woodstock and beyond, Where Are You Now, Bo Diddley? takes a close look at forty-seven musicians whose unique contributions to their thrilling era will never be forgotten.

Ernest Newman's four-volume Life of Wagner, originally published between 1933 and 1947, remains a classic work of biography. The culmination of forty years' research on the composer and his works (Newman's first Study of Wagner was first published in 1899), these books present a detailed portrait...

From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year. Following a run of New Year's concerts at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds...

Atlantic Records partner and producer, Wexler presided over the evolution of the modern music business and made prodigious contributions through to our cultural history. Wexler has worked with the entire range of American genius: Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and others. 75 photographs.