Description: Text by William Boyd. It was while on assignment for a British art magazine that the novelist William Boyd came across a single work by the obscure painter Nat Tate. The work so intrigued Boyd that he began to search out everything he could find about the artist. The result of his endeavor is this book, which tells the fascinating and tragic story of the extremely gifted and unjustly neglected Tate, and includes examples of his work. This is the first book on Tate, an artist who until now had been virtually forgotten. Born on Long Island in 1928, Tate was "discovered" by poet Frank O'Hara in 1952. O'Hara was impressed by the work of the shy and unassuming artist, who was still living with his step parents at the time. Among the pieces Tate created was an epic sequence of drawings based on Hart Crane's The Bridge. Soon after meeting O'Hara, Tate was showing in New York galleries, and was being mentioned alongside the abstract expressionists of that golden post-war period. But Tate's life took a turn for the worse when he returned from France in the summer of 1959. There, he had visited Braque and seems to have had a nervous breakdown. In 1960, Tate threw himself off the Staten Island Ferry, and drowned in the manner of his mentor, Hart Crane.

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