Steven Naifeh

On October 18, 2011, Random House is publishing the biography of Vincent van Gogh by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, authors of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Jackson Pollock. (The book will also be published in the United Kingdom on November 3, 2011, as well as in The Netherlands, Germany, South Korea, and other countries.)

Vincent van Gogh has achieved the status of a celebrity that is almost unique among cultural figures. Hundreds of thousands of people visit the almost yearly retrospectives of Van Gogh's work in major museums around the world (821,000 people, for example, visited the exhibition in Los Angeles in 2000), more than two million people a year visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and almost half a million people a year visit his grave in Auvers. Despite this vast audience of people who feel a personal relationship to Van Gogh, no one has yet attempted the definitive biography.

With the cooperation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which gave the authors access to its wealth of primary materials, including a vast family correspondence, and an archives that resembles a presidential library, the authors have written what Leo Jansen, Curator of the Museum and Editor of the Van Gogh Letters Project has called "The definitive biography of Van Gogh for decades to come."

This new biography reshapes the landscape of Van Gogh's life, and death. For the first time, the authors provide a record of Van Gogh's early, turbulent career, first as an art dealer in the family business, then as a preacher, and finally as one of the unhappiest but most incandescently productive figures in the history of art. Because of the wealth of materials available to them, Naifeh and Smith have not only written an account of an extraordinary and at times emotionally convulsive life but also, perhaps, the first book to trace the workings of an artistic mind in such graphic, gripping, and ultimately inspirational detail.

The authors' Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Jackson Pollock was also a finalist for the National Book Award, a national bestseller, the basis of the Academy-Award winning film Pollock with Ed Harris, and the inspiration for John Updike's Seek my Face.

The authors spent more than ten years writing their definitive biography, but even that was only possible because they commissioned proprietary software that allowed them to work digitally throughout the writing process. They were also assisted by a team of two full-time and eighteen part-time translators (who created the first English translation of the family letters as well as a library of sources in English previously available only in Dutch), along with five full-time and six part-time researchers.