Current Exhibition

Writing at its inner source is a deeply comforting activity, an ordering and a purging and a bringing into the light what had been hidden an hour before.
- John Updike from the Introduction to The Writer's Desk by Jill Krementz

Jill Krementz, the nation's preeminent author portraitist, has spent a career photographing writers engaged in their "deeply comforting" activities. There is a mischievous Truman Capote in his apartment. Toni Morrison, on a sofa, with pen and paper. Maurice Sendak flanked by one of his "wild things." E.B. White in the boathouse where Charlotte wove her web. Authors Amy Tan, Stephen King and Edward Gorey with their pets under, around or on them.

The Mark Twain House & Museum has organized an exhibition of images of the renowned writers of our time from the remarkable files of Jill Krementz. As a photojournalist, Krementz covered the most newsworthy stories of the past 40 years for the New York Herald Tribune, Time and Life. As an author, she produced the groundbreaking Sweat Pea - A Black Girl Growing Up in the Rural South, and the acclaimed A Very Young and How It Feels book series. And in The Writer's Desk, she captured authors at work, at home, and at play. "I try to show the private side of people without violating their privacy."