Hard White

In this vividly-rendered novel, Melanie Dugan reimagines the live of Alice Neel, a groundbreaking American painter who revolutionized the art of the portrait in the twentieth century. Born in 1900 into a straitlaced middle-class family, Neel charted her own unconventional path. Her lifetime spanned World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic, women winning the right to vote, the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy Era, the Civil Rights Era, and second-wave feminism. Neel worked for decades in obscurity, wrestling with depression, poverty, and misogyny, loving the wrong men, fighting to live life on her own terms, and above all, to paint.