An artist's life: Classic Book Guide and Free Edition
An artist's life: author and translator credits, catalogue synopsis, subjects and links to the Gutenberg reading formats.
An artist's life is catalogued by Project Gutenberg with author credits for Harrison, Harry (1925–2012).
Catalogue synopsis
Project Gutenberg supplies this automated synopsis of the opening text:
An artist's life by Harry Harrison is a science fiction short story written in the mid-20th century. It centers on art and perception, following a painter whose hunt for an authentically “alien” vision exposes a concealed extraterrestrial presence operating on Earth. The story follows Brent Dalgreen, a famed artist weakened and dying from radiation after a year painting on the Moon. At the Metropolitan Museum he detects an unsettling, nonhuman sensibility in an autumn landscape by Arthur Di Costa, then meets Di Costa and his wife, noticing the same uncanny slant in a portrait and suspecting an inhuman perspective behind it. Shadowing Di Costa, Brent witnesses a cryptic note trigger a trance and follows him to a hidden underground office, where a powerful telepathic administrator reveals the truth: Earth is used as a covert sanitarium by an advanced alien civilization, and Di Costa—recreated in human form—is a congenitally feeble-minded “outpatient” whose early alien impressions seep into his paintings. When Brent tries to resist, the director subdues him and decides to “dispose” of the risk humanely by relocating him—after curing his radiation damage—to another sanitarium world with a chlorine atmosphere, leaving him unconscious but oddly hopeful about the new colors he might paint there.
Book and edition facts
- Title: An artist's life
- Author credits: Harrison, Harry (1925–2012)
- Catalogue language: English
Catalogue subjects
- Painters -- Fiction
- Science fiction
- Short stories
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View the complete Gutenberg catalogue record. Project Gutenberg identifies this edition as public domain in the United States; that designation does not establish its copyright status in every country.
Source notes
Catalogue metadata is public domain and is supplied through Gutendex, which imports Gutenberg's machine-readable catalogue. The automated synopsis is source-supplied, not an independently verified review. Author dates above describe the credited people; no ebook release date is presented as the book's original publication date.
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