"In 1955, having just ended his high-profile but stormy career with Life magazine by resigning, W. Eugene Smith was commissioned to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh and produce one hundred photographs for noted journalist and author Stefan Lorant's book commemorating the city's bicentennial. Smith stayed a year, compiling nearly seventeen thousand photographs for what would be the most ambitious photographic essay of his life.

But only a fragment of the work was ever seen, despite Smith's lifelong conviction that it was his greatest set of photographs. Now, in an astonishing, first-time assemblage of the core images Smith asserted were the "synthesis of the whole," we see not only a portrayal of Pittsburgh but of mid-century, postwar America."--BOOK JACKET.