HISTORICAL NOTE

The Last Summer of the World is a work of fiction. While many of the people and events in the novel have bases in reality, I have taken significant poetic license with the details of the characters’ lives and motivations. In the interests of creating a coherent and integrated story, I have invented incidents that probably or definitely did not take place and in some cases altered the chronology of the real occurrences described.

Between 1906 and 1914, the photographer Edward Steichen did reside in France. He came to Paris first as a student in 1900 and then, after a stint in New York, he returned to Europe with his wife, Clara, and their young daughter, Mary, living first in Montparnasse and then moving, shortly before the birth of their second daughter, Kate, to a house in Voulangis, a village to the east of Paris.

For those years, Steichen and Clara divided their time between their country house and two daughters, and their many friends, a group that included Henri and Amélie Matisse, Leo and Gertrude Stein, the journalist Mildred Aldrich, the painters Arthur Carles and Marion Beckett, and Edward’s great mentor and friend, Auguste Rodin. But beneath an idyllic surface, there were tensions stirring between these two headstrong and artistically inclined people. As her later writings indicate, Clara was coming to feel increasingly discontented in her marriage, even as she longed to fulfill the idealized role of self-sacrificing wife and helpmeet. This situation was not helped by Edward’s rumored infidelities with, among others, the British sculptor Kathleen Bruce and the dancer Isadora Duncan.

Then, in the summer of 1914, larger events overtook them. The Steichens and their friends watched as Europe descended with disorienting speed into war, and, simultaneously, the stresses inside Edward and Clara’s relationship erupted into a bitter fight that tore the family in half. Clara accused Edward of being unfaithful with their mutual friend Marion Beckett, who was staying with them for the summer. Edward denied the affair, and only the urgency of evacuating their children from the path of the war made them temporarily put aside their quarrel. In the end, they left their home and returned to America, taking with them only what they could carry, just three days ahead of advancing German troops.

Once they were all established in the States, relations between Edward and Clara deteriorated still further, and finally in the summer of 1915, Clara took her younger daughter, Kate, and crossed the Atlantic once more. She lived for the next two years in their old house in the Marne, enduring the hardships and privations of wartime.

When America entered the war in April of 1917, Edward Steichen joined the new Photography Division of the Army Signal Corps and was assigned to help develop aerial reconnaissance photography for the American Expeditionary Force in France. He was responsible for organizing reconnaissance ahead of the critical Second Battle of the Marne; for most of the war his role was administrative, although he did take aerial photographs of the front, which he later exhibited. He returned to his house during this period for the first time since abandoning it in 1914 and found that his photographs and negatives had been severely damaged during the intervening years. According to Steichen’s biographer Penelope Niven, he and Marion Beckett did encounter each other at one point during the war. Steichen’s sister, Lilian, told her daughter Helga Sandburg that her uncle was having a love affair with a beautiful American woman while he was serving in France, though she did not, apparently, give any further details of the woman’s identity. In 1919, Clara Steichen sued Marion Beckett in New York, charging that she had destroyed her marriage by conducting a protracted affair with her husband. Clara was unable to prove her claims and lost the suit.

Of the photographs described in the novel, some but not all of them are genuine Steichen photographs from the early decades of the twentieth century. Notably, Self-Portrait, 1898, was the entry that Steichen sent to the Second Philadelphia Salon, and which first brought him to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz. Also, the photograph Wheelbarrow with Flowerpots, 1920, was part of a series of experiments Steichen made in photographic abstraction during the years immediately following the war.

In 1923, Steichen, then living in his old house in the Marne, burned his paintings, because he wanted to devote himself henceforth to photography; only those paintings that had already been sold survived. He remained in Europe for several years after the war before returning to America. In the 1920s and ’30s he worked for Vanity Fair, and took some of the most well-recognized portraits of that era, including pictures of Winston Churchill, Greta Garbo, Paul Robeson and Charlie Chaplin. He was reunited with his children, and eventually married his second wife, the actress and writer Dana Desboro Glover. In World War Two, despite being fifty-six years old at the war’s inception, Steichen again volunteered and was sent to the Pacific to document in photographs life on board an aircraft carrier. In 1946 he became the director of the Photography Department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and orchestrated “The Family of Man” exhibition in 1955, his attempt to show, through photography, the common humanity of all races and cultures in the face of the rising tensions of the Cold War.

After her divorce, Clara Steichen lived in the Azores and later in Vermont. She wrote an autobiographical work entitled An Ozark Childhood, which was never published. She did not remarry. Mary Steichen became a physician, and Kate Steichen became an opera and choral singer. Marion Beckett returned to the United States, and in the 1920s adopted two children. She lived and worked in Washington, D.C., sharing an apartment with the painter Katharine Rhoades. In 1925 her paintings were shown at the Montross Gallery in New York.

In 1960, after Dana’s death, Steichen married Joanna Taub. He died in 1973.