Modern Life places Hopper s achievements in the context of his contemporaries: the Ashcan School painters with whom he came of age as an artist in the 20th century s first decades; Precisionist artists of the 1920s, whose explorations of abstract architectural geometries mirrored those of Hopper; and a younger generation of American Scene painters, who worked alongside Hopper in New York during the 1930s. One of the foremost chroniclers of pre-World War II American urbanism, painter and printmaker, Edward Hopper depicted hauntingly isolated figures in diners, railroad cars, and rented rooms at the beginning of the 20th century. A lifelong New Yorker, Hopper took the loneliness of big city life as one of his most persistent themes, and his often dark and remarkably realistic works have come to symbolise the melancholy of modern life. This new and sumptuously illustrated volume reproduces nine of Hopper s major works, together with selections from more than 30 other well-known artists of the time, including Man Ray, Lyonel Feininger, Charles Sheeler and Georgia O'Keeffe, John Sloan, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Charles Demuth, Guy Pène du Bois, Charles Burchfield, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Reginald Marsh, and Jacob Lawrence. Together, these works illustrate the rapid development of cities, a central theme in American art prior to World War II. Powerful and sometimes nostalgic, the works of Hopper and his contemporaries portray an earlier modern America yet one whose sense of isolation, estrangement, and vulnerability resonates equally well with today s increasingly fast-paced society. Modern Life is a beautiful and informative book and a fine introduction to this important group of 20th-century artists.