DURBIN, Andrew
The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek [US EDITION]

When Paul Thek met Peter Hujar in the winter of 1956 in Coral Gables, Florida, a slow-simmering connection began to burn. Thek, 23 and living in Miami, was handsome and itching to make it as a painter; in the 22-year-old Hujar, a shy, sensual photographer, he’d found a kindred spirit. By 1960, they were dating and living in New York, beginning decades of sex, love, competition, and reconciliation—an entanglement that changed American art forever.

Surrounded by a robust creative scene populated by Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, and David Wojnarowicz, Thek and Hujar’s profoundly influential careers, from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, differed as much as the men themselves. The unpredictable and often overlooked Thek crafted visceral installations and sculptures, while Hujar, celebrated and sociable, took penetrating portraits of his world, queer and otherwise. Yet even at their most estranged, and even after their deaths from AIDS, both men were united by a pursuit of liberation—from artistic and sexual limits, from anything short of changing the world.

Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundaryburning, paradigm-tilting, never more relevant American artists. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men's inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin’s book is an ode to a lost but still-living world—and two men who defined it. [publishers’ note]

“I don’t think I’ve ever read a biography I’d describe as tender before. Is that because this one’s about a relationship, coming and going in a world full of change and detail, travel, and being both unmoored and ecstatic? This book is totally about the failure of love and revolutions and how our presence in and out and around those states is how we know we’re alive. The secret star of the book is Paul Thek’s collaborator, artist Ann Wilson who sees it all. Andrew Durbin does too and has made of these lives and these times a jam-packed poem in prose. It’s like a trip with these guys, without pulling tight at the ending, just death.”
—Eileen Myles

“Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, devastatingly undervalued during their lifetimes, met as they began ground-breaking art careers that are only now attracting huzzahs and serious study. Theirs was a liberating lovership friendship until the connection cracked behind Thek’s restlessness and Hujar’s prickliness. Vivid and richly detailed, this biography of their relationship also evokes the texture of bohemian life in the Sixties, both the struggles and the seemingly endless possibilities.”
—Cynthia Carr 

Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2026
Biographies / Queer Culture