Limelight: A Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the Fifties : A Memoir
For seven short years, a coffeehouse in Greenwich Village called Limelight was  at the center of the art-photography world. There, owner Helen Gee exhibited the works  of such luminaries as Harry Callahan, Bill Brandt, Imogen Cunningham, and Lisette  Model at a time when photography was not yet considered an art, and the sticker prices  on the prints were a mere fraction of what they'd be today.Limelightis Gee's  memoir, a story about the coffeehouse she started, the people she knew, and the times in  which she lived.Even without the coffeehouse, Gee's life is like something out of a novel: at age 16 she  left home to live in Greenwich Village with a Chinese painter named Yun Gee. The late  '30s and early '40s were hardly a time of racial tolerance in the United States, and so their  romance was disliked as much for its interracial nature as for the age difference between  the two lovers. After the birth of their daughter, Yun Gee developed schizophrenia,  leaving Helen to fend for herself and her child. She did this in a variety of ways before  finally hitting on the idea of opening a coffeehouse. InLimelightGee describes  the obstacles she faced in starting the place, the people she met while running it, and the  eventual problems--both political and personal--that brought Limelight down. This  memoir is both Gee's story and the story of the art community in 1950s, both of which  are worth telling.