Freed at Last: The Max Freed Stories Kindle Edition

Max Freed is a fictional photographer born in the early years of the Twentieth Century and living almost to the end of those traumatic times, taking pictures all the way through his memorable journey. The Max Freed Stories are linked by their eponymous hero/anti-hero and add up to a near-novel. They begin on the Lower East Side of New York where Max Freed, a precocious photographer feeds his family by his portraits of the budding Yiddish bourgeoise and continues his success into the Roaring Twenties when he is the Gatsby of photography and a friend to Alfred Stieglitz. Then the Depression hits and Freed falls into failure, nearly starving. Turning to photo reportage, Freed finds his life's work photographing strikes but an encounter with a goon squad proves near-fatal. Freed is rescued by a beautiful acquaintance from his past but loses her to the Communist Party. During the Second World War, Freed is made a captain in charge of V-mail in India. During the 1950s Freed again finds success, sexual and otherwise, as an in-house photographer for the great Florida hotels of that era and swings his way through the Sixties. This too ends badly and by the late1970s Freed is back in his native New York, again in bad financial straits with a lone admirer, the awful Leon Goldberg. But a series of misadventures, again involving a beautiful woman--Claire Watkins, a feminist scholar--leads Freed to fame and fortune in California, ditching Goldberg along the way. The book ends ironically with Freed becoming Freed at last, a photographer known world-wide. But is he really freed? These stories were written over several decades and the earlier two stories were enjoyed with one published by Keith Botsford and Saul Bellow in News from The Republic of Letters. Read more