"Like Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe, Diane Arbus exerts a fascination rooted in both her art and her life. Her startling photographic images of dwarfs, twins, transvestites, and freaks seemed from the first to redefine both the normal and the abnormal in our lives; they were already becoming part of the iconography of the age when Arbus committed suicide in 1971. Although her work continues to fascinate viewers years after her death, Arbus herself has remained an enigma." "In this first full biography, Patricia Bosworth examines the life and the world behind Arbus's eerie, mesmerizing images: the pampered New York childhood, her passionate marriage to Allan Arbus and their work together as fashion photographers during the fifties; her years as a conventional wife and mother; the emotional upheaval surrounding the end of her marriage; and the radically dark, liberating, and ultimately tragic turn her art took during the sixties. Bosworth's book is a compassionate portrait of the woman behind some of the most powerful photographs of our time."--Jacket.