Providing both authorized biography and artistic analysis, this book draws on previously unpublished correspondence to describe the emergence of the American artist Fairfield Porter as a figurative painter in the post-war decades of Abstract Expressionism who struggled to achieve recognition. Porter's work is significant for its quintessentially American subject matter, and the book presents 280 paintings, prints and drawings as a kind of autobiography, for the artist's subjects were always himself, his family and friends, and the places where he lived.