Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis

(NYTBR) Edward Curtis deserves to be remembered as the American artist who racked up the most miles. Traveling by rail, wagon and foot, he undertook a project that struck observers as ambitious and possibly insane. His goal, he said, was to salvage a heritage from oblivion, to document all the tribes in North America that were still intact. The result was his magnum opus, “The North American Indian,” a 20-volume text-and-image extravaganza, published between 1907 and 1930, that was praised and then forgotten in short order. Curtis spent his final years holed up in Southern California, living a marginal hand-to-mouth existence and consuming a pound of carrots a day in the hope of warding off blindness. Continued