University of Chicago Press author, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, dedicated Americanist, photographer, writer, cyclist, and musician Peter Bacon Hales (1950–2014) died earlier this week, near his home in upstate New York. Once a student of the photographers Garry Winogrand and Russell Lee, Hales obtained his MA and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, and launched an academic career around American art and culture that saw him take on personal and collaborative topics as diverse as the history of urban photography, the Westward Expansion of the United States, the Manhattan Project, Levittown, contemporary art, and the geographical landscapes of our virtual and built worlds. He began teaching at UIC in 1980, and went on to become director of their American Studies Institute. His most recent book, Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now, was published by the University of Chicago Press earlier this year.

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From Outside the Gates of Eden:

“We live, then, second lives, and third, and fourth—protean lives, threatened by the lingering traces of our mistakes, but also amenable to self-invention and renewal. . . . The cultural landscape [of the future] is hazy:  it could be a desert or a garden, or something in between. It is and will be populated by Americans, or by those infected by the American imagination: a little cynical, skeptical, self-righteous, self-deprecating, impatient, but interested, engaged, argumentative, observant of the perilous beauty of a landscape we can never possess but yearn to be a part of, even as we are restive, impatient to go on. It’s worth waiting around to see how it turns out.”