"He has often been acclaimed as the poet of the ordinary, the nondescript--the forerunner of photographers like Walker Evans--conferring unprecedented attention on gas stations, motel rooms, movie theaters, city streets and buildings, bare offices, late-night diners, clapboard houses, railroad tracks, empty fields, and deserted country roads."
Early Influences
Born in 1882, Hopper was the son of a dry-goods merchant, Garrett Henry Hopper, and his wife Elizabeth Griffiths Smith Hopper. The second of their two children, "Eddie," as he was called as a child, and his sister Marion grew up in Nyack, New York, a mid-sized town situated on the banks of the Hudson River. Though the Hoppers were earnest Baptists--his maternal great-grandfather was the founder of the Baptist congregation in Nyack--they were also lovers of art and literature. The books of French and Russian authors such as Victor Hugo and Ivan Turgenev were present in his house, while Elizabeth Hopper instilled in both children an appreciation for the visual arts.
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