Tracings: A Book of Partial Portraits

With exuberance and a gift for conjuring a personality in a few deft strokes, Horgan records his encounters with famous and near-famous people in this delightful memoir. As an 18-year-old reporter in Albuquerque, he interviewed poet Vachel Lindsay, a future suicide victim who spoke incessantly of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead . A prolific novelist and historian, Horgan writes movingly of his long-time friend Igor Stravinsky who clung tenaciously to music during his final illness. Horgan joins Frieda Lawrence on a pilgrimage to the chapel tomb of her famous novelist husband near Taos, New Mexico. Meetings with a fractious, outspoken Edmund Wilson, a carefree T. S. Eliot, Greta Garbo, Aldous Huxley, Thornton Wilder, W. Somerset Maugham, painter Peter Hurd and opera stars Mary Garden and Feodor Chaliapin enliven this serendipitous portrait gallery. (Sept.)