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  • The American Scholar

    Image Was Everything

    Mar 02, 2020 5 minutes
    Review by Meryle Secrest

    WARHOL

    BY BLAKE GOPNIK

    Ecco, 976 pp., $45

    ONE SHOULD APPROACH this elephantine account of Andy Warhol’s life—perhaps modeled on one of his endless films, like Sleep(1963)—with caution. To begin with, there are no source notes—some 7,000 of them are available online but not on a page. For a work that plainly hopes to be termed “definitive,” this is a curious omission.

    Then there is the staggering length, almost 1,000 pages, made all the more challenging by Blake Gopnik’s verbosity, which reveals a steely determination to tell you far more than you ever asked to know. Given the two schools of biography—telling a rollicking good story and details be damned versus a minute chronology and reader be damned—this author opts for the latter. Apart from the book’s tantalizing

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