Page 122 – LIFE

Johnny Cash: A National Treasure

August 12, 2021April 25, 2013 by

There aren’t too many American musicians of the past century who left a richer legacy, or were more influential across a broader range of genres, than the Man in Black. Through six decades, Johnny Cash created music that spoke with power and eloquence to sharecroppers, punk rockers, prison inmates and hip-hoppers. Many of the songs he penned or famously recorded—”Big River,” “I Walk the Line,” “Ring of Fire,” “A Boy Named Sue,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Get Rhythm,” “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” “The Matador” and on and on—have not only become classics, but have been embraced as national treasures by Americans of every political stance, creed and ethnicity.

[Buy the LIFE book, Johnny Cash: An Illustrated Biography]

But Johnny Cash was not merely a great songwriter and singularly engaging singer. He was a cultural force. When he sang with a young Bob Dylan on Dylan’s gorgeous “Girl From the North Country” in 1969, the pairing was a quiet revolution, reconciling Dylan’s New Folk counterculture blues with Cash’s old-school, hillbilly honky-tonk.

When he recorded Peter LaFarge’s “Ballad of Ira Hayes” in 1964 and took it to No. 3 on the Billboard country charts, he brought the terrible tale of how one of the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima died, drunk and alone, to far more people than had ever heard the song or the story before.

Here, in tribute to the one and only Johnny Cash, LIFE.com presents a selection of photos made for a November 1969 feature in the magazine titled “Hard-Times King of Song.”

Some of these photos will be of particular interest to fans of the outstanding 2005 biopic Walk The Line. The pictures of Johnny Cash on his tractor or fishing with his father on the pier by his house call to mind key moments from that film, which received five Oscar nominations.

Cash, LIFE told its readers, was a man who had lived hard, had come through and, by all measures, showed no sign of letting the limelight alter the essentials of who he was and what he believed.

His face looks ruined, his lean body whipped out. He sings, off-key, of bygone days that many of his listeners can’t even remember: railroads, hobos on the open road, Depression, hard times he knew growing up poor in an Arkansas cotton patch. These are curiously old-fashioned themes, but the homely lyrics and rough-cut personality of Johnny Cash make them fresh.

Cash, 37, has been singing and writing country ballads for 15 years. He has recorded more than 300 songs and written twice that many, most of them an unpromising mixture of folklore, sentiment and pure corn that until recently appealed mainly to fans of the Grand Ole Opry. Now the young like him because he has the ring of authenticity and supports social causes, such as prison reform. . . . Only two years ago Cash was down and out himself. Before he kicked the habit, he became so addicted to pep pills that he woke up in a Georgia jail unable to remember how he got there.

Cash appeals to Americans who are increasingly fed up with the pressure and confusions of city life and yearn to get back to the land. “Last year it was soul,” says a friend. “This year everybody is scratching in the soil. That’s why Johnny works. He’s got soil.”

The image of Johnny Cash that appeared on the cover of the November 21, 1969, issue of LIFE.

Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Johnny Cash in Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash with friends and family at his home in Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash in Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash in Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash and Jack Palance, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roy Orbison played for guests at Johnny Cash’s house, Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash in Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash during a recording session at Columbia Studio B, Nashville, Tennessee.

Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Johnny Cash in Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash fished with his father outside his Tennessee home, 1969.

Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Johnny Cash fished in a lake near his Tennessee home, 1969.

Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Johnny Cash drove a tractor on his estate, 1969.

Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Johnny Cash with wife June Carter at home.

Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

LIFE With Woody Guthrie: Photos of an American Treasure

August 12, 2021April 24, 2013 by

In 1943, Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie was about to publish his now-classic, semi-fictionalized autobiography, Bound for Glory, in which he wrote vibrantly about his childhood, his love of American folk songs and his epic travels as a freight car-hopping itinerant poet during the Depression.

While Bound for Glory would introduce Guthrie to a broader audience than the relatively few who, at the time, knew him only through his music, Woody was already something of an underground hero to other musicians folk and protest singers who soon, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, would be shaking America from its post-war somnolence. A politically engaged artist, Guthrie crafted wrenching tales of loss and struggle, as well as paeans to romantic love and heartfelt, platitude-free patriotism, into some of the most enduring music America has ever produced.

In fact, at the time the photographs in this gallery were made, Guthrie had written and performed, but not yet published, the simple, celebratory song that countless Americans consider the United States’ genuine national anthem: “This Land Is Your Land.”

Here, in tribute to an utterly singular American life, LIFE.com presents photos none of which appeared in LIFE magazine from 1943, chronicling the guitar-strumming Oklahoma native’s rambles through wartime New York City.

“The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution,” Guthrie once asserted, in one of his philosophically tinged writings, “because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine. . . . There’s a feeling in music and it carries you back down the road you have traveled and makes you travel it again. Sometimes when I hear music I think back over my days and a feeling that is fifty-fifty joy and pain swells like clouds taking all kinds of shapes in my mind.”

A self-taught visual artist (accomplished sketches, cartoons, caricatures and line drawings fill many, many notebooks) as well as an inveterate, almost obsessive journal-keeper, Guthrie had a relationship with music that brings to mind the grit and very occasional glamor not only of the open road, but of the troubadour’s wandering life. Of Bound for Glory, New York Times reviewer Clifton Fadiman wrote: “Some day people are going to wake up to the fact that Woody Guthrie and the ten thousand songs that leap and tumble off the strings of his music box are a national possession like Yellowstone and Yosemite, and part of the best stuff this country has to show the world.”

Guthrie had a strong connection to New York City, too, living on Mermaid Avenue in Brooklyn in the 1940s an evocative address made famous to a new generation of fans by Billy Bragg and Wilco, who put unpublished Guthrie lyrics to music in scores of wonderful songs, collected and released by Nonesuch records as Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions (2012).

New York City was where Woody Guthrie made his first professional recordings; where he wrote “This Land Is Your Land”; where he befriended and collaborated with other politically minded artists like Pete Seeger; and where his devotees including the likes of Bob Dylan and the great Phil Ochs later ignited their own Guthrie-inspired folk scene in downtown coffee houses and dives. “You could listen to his songs and learn how to live,” Dylan once said of his hero’s life and work.

On assignment for LIFE in 1943, photographer Eric Schaal followed Guthrie as he gave impromptu performances around New York in bars, on the stoops of brownstones, on the subway. Engaging and at ease, the Woody Guthrie of these photos is exactly where he liked to be: among working people, and the children of working people, guitar in hand, sharing his own lyrics and the lyrics of other folk musicians with the very men and women those lyrics were always written for, and about.

“I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world,” Guthrie once said, “no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built. I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.”

“Woody is just Woody,” another American artist, John Steinbeck, once wrote. “Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal . . . there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who still listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.”

Woody Guthrie died on Oct. 3, 1967, from complications brought on by Huntington’s disease, when he was only 55.

Woody Guthrie, New York, 1943

Eric Schaal Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Woody Guthrie in New York, 1943

Eric Schaal Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Woody Guthrie, New York City, 1943

Eric Schaal Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Woody Guthrie in New York, 1943

Eric Schaal Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Woody Guthrie, New York City, 1943

Eric Schaal Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Woody Guthrie in New York, 1943

Eric Schaal Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Woody Guthrie, New York City, 1943

Eric Schaal Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Woody Guthrie in New York, 1943

Eric Schaal Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE With Jayne Mansfield: Vintage Photos of a Pop-Culture Icon

June 16, 2023April 18, 2013 by

The actress and singer Jayne Mansfield (born Vera Jayne Palmer on April 19, 1933) was one of those quintessentially American pop-culture creations who helped define the country’s mood playful, naive, expansive in the middle part of the 20th century. That she was also, in large part, a self-created icon who reveled in publicity stunts only added, and still adds today, to her appeal: it’s difficult, after all, to dislike someone who so giddily pursues fame, and who so exuberantly embraces it once it’s attained.

Here, LIFE.com remembers the archetypal blonde bombshell with a series of photos none of which ran in LIFE magazine made by Peter Stackpole in the spring of 1956. Mansfield was in her early 20s at the time and, while she was not yet a full-fledged movie star, she was clearly someone to watch; she had already made a name for herself on Broadway and was, it seemed, destined for bigger things on the silver screen. As LIFE wrote in an April 1956 issue:

Though the thought has never crossed her pretty blond head, Jayne Mansfield is one of the most interesting sociological studies to be found anywhere in the U.S. this spring. Miss Mansfield has burst dazzlingly upon the theatrical world as a star of a Broadway comedy called Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and currently seems to be getting her name and photograph into more Broadway columns and movie magazines than any other actress alive. . . . Miss Mansfield is still just herself, friendly and frank, perhaps even somewhat naive in her own calculating way. This is a rare situation, for ordinarily a movie queen is presented to the public only after some studio has gone to immense expense changing her over completely, to the point where her own mother would not recognize her.

Miss Mansfield does not even obey cliché No. 1 of the movie queen, which is to act bored with success. No teen-ager ever exhibited so much tenacity at seeking autographs as she does at signing them; she will stand in wind, rain or snow until her last admirer is satisfied.

She has the same come-hither-you-brute sort of voice and look as Marilyn Monroe. But the comparison, which a more seasoned actress would at least pretend to love, does not seem to please Miss Mansfield at all. “Marilyn is very attractive and all that,” she has said, “but she and I are entirely different. I can dye my hair and play a serious part.” For that matter Miss Mansfield would not even have to dye her hair. She could just let it grow back to its natural color, which she admits, again in gross violation of the movie queen’s code, is brown.

Despite her best efforts, however and in spite of the fact that she was, after all, a talented actress and (classically trained) musician Mansfield found it hard to get solid film roles, and her screen career was spotty after the mid-1950s. She did find great success (and riches) as a nightclub entertainer in her late 20s and early 30s, and (who knows?) might have parlayed that into a movie-career resurgence if her life had not been cut short. Riding home from a Mississippi nightclub in June 1967, Mansfield was killed when her driver slammed into the back of a tractor-trailer.

Jayne Mansfield was 34 when she died.

Jayne Mansfield 1956

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE With Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier: Photos From the ‘Wedding of the Century’

November 18, 2019April 17, 2013 by

Before Harry and Meghan, before William and Kate, before Charles and Di, before Liz and Dick (I and II), before any of the “storybook” weddings of the past several decades, there was the fairytale wedding of the last century: the April 1956 nuptials of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III of Monaco. The tale of the American movie star and Philadelphia native marrying the prince of a small, sensationally wealthy city-state was simply too perfect to ignore and for months leading up to the event, from the time of the couple’s engagement until the two ceremonies (civil and religious) that formalized their union, the Hollywood princess and the real-life prince were hardly ever out of the news.

Here, LIFE.com presents photos many of which never ran in LIFE magazine from the moment the couple announced their engagement in January 1956 until they were married three and a half months later in Monaco. In an issue published a few weeks after the wedding, LIFE framed the singular phenomenon for the magazine’s millions of readers:

Largely ignored throughout its long history, the pint-sized principality of Monaco last week enjoyed a beautiful modern recognition. Grace Kelly, daughter of a millionaire former hod carrier [in short, a construction laborer] from Philadelphia and the virtual princess of moviedom’s make-believe world, was getting married there. She was becoming a princess officially by her marriage to Monaco’s Prince Rainier, who holds 139 other titles and is absolute ruler of a 370-acre realm with 20,000 subjects.

Throughout the palpitant anxieties which are the lot of every bride, Miss Kelly was everything the enthusiastic Monegasques could have wished. She had to go through two weddings, separately required by the Napoleonic Code of Monaco and the laws of the Roman Catholic Church. . . . [After the first she assumed the title] Her Serene Highness, Princess Gracia Patricia of Monaco. [During the second] she became a wife indeed when she helped the nervous Prince Rainier settle the ring on her finger.

And so an old-style fairy tale came to its appropriately romantic conclusion, but only after a number of modern day variations and additions had come to pass.

The princess-to-be had barley set foot in Monaco when the principality and much of the rest of Europe were there bearing gifts. The wedding presents ranged from the fabulous to the foolish. Among the more practical was a Rolls-Royce, among the less useful a gold and bone hatchet.

All the loose wealth gathered there acted magnetically on Europe’s thieves. $50,000 worth of jewels swiped from the wife of a pal of Grace’s father . . . $8,000 in gems lifted from the hotel room of one of the bridesmaids.

After their wedding, Monaco’s newlyweds wasted no time starting a family: Nine months and four days later, Grace gave birth to Princess Caroline, their first of three children. The couple was married for 26 years, until the princess’ death in 1982 from injuries sustained in a car accident. The prince, who never remarried and who died in 2005, is buried beside his wife in the Grimaldi family vault, inside the Monaco cathedral where they wed.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier wed, St. Nicholas Cathedral, Monaco, April 19, 1956.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier show her engagement ring to her mother and father at the Kelly home in Philadelphia, 1956.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Monaco’s Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly at time of the announcement of their engagement, January 1956.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier arrive at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, the day after announcing their engagement, January 1956.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, the day after announcing their engagement, January 1956.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier dance not long after announcing their engagement, 1956.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Smiling in a brisk March wind and surrounded by photographers and fans, Grace Kelly poses just off of Fifth Avenue in New York, 1956.

Lisa Larsen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly takes a momentary breather while packing her things before the wedding, 1956.

Lisa Larsen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly inside a New York jewelry store, where she perused possible gifts for her groom.

Lisa Larsen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly packing for her trip to Monaco, March 1956.

Lisa Larsen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly, March 1956.

Lisa Larsen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly and her poodle, Oliver, 1956.

Lisa Larsen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly with her mother, Margaret Majer Kelly, before leaving New York for Monaco in March 1956.

Lisa Larsen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly (left) and one of her two sisters (either Peggy or Lizanne), New York City, 1956.

Lisa Larsen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Seamstresses work on Grace Kelly’s wedding dress and veil, conceived by MGM’s wardrobe designer, Helen Rose, Hollywood, Calif., 1956.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A woman puts the finishing touches on the pearl-studded prayer book for Grace Kelly’s wedding, Hollywood, Calif., 1956.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly leaves a Hollywood studio lot for last time before her marriage, 1956.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly, SS Constitution, 1956

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly in Monaco, April 1956.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly in Monaco before her wedding, April 1956.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier in Monaco, the day before their wedding, April 1956.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Prince Rainier III and Grace Kelly ascend the steps of Monaco Palace. Kelly’s dress required 25 yards of silk taffeta, 100 yards of silk net, 125-year-old rose-point lace bought from a museum, and thousands of tiny pearls.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier kneel during Mass at their religious wedding, April 1956.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly prays before her wedding to Prince Rainier III, April 1956.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier join hands as the Bishop of Monaco, Mgr. Gilles Barthe, administers the nuptial benediction at Saint Nicholas Cathedral, April 1956.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Wedding ceremony of Prince Rainier III of Monaco to Grace Kelly, April 1956.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Princess Grace and Prince Rainier III, newlyweds, April 1956.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Princess Grace and Prince Rainier III, newlyweds, are whisked away in a Rolls Royce convertible, April 1956.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Prince Rainier III and Her Serene Highness, Princess Gracia Patricia of Monaco, April 19, 1956.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fireworks light up the sky above Monaco in celebration of the wedding of Prince Rainier III and Grace Kelly, April 1956.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III of Monaco, April 1956.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At the Gates of Hell: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, April 1945

August 12, 2021April 12, 2013 by

Compared to the appalling number of men, women and children killed at the Nazi extermination camps places like Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka and others where, cumulatively, millions perished the death toll at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwest Germany was (a horrible thing to say!) relatively small. More than a million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone; at Belsen, by most estimates, fewer than 100,000 died from starvation and disease (typhus, for example), as well as outright slaughter.

But in the spring of 1945, photographs and eyewitness accounts from the liberation of camps like Bergen-Belsen afforded the disbelieving world outside of Europe its first glimpse into the abyss of Nazi depravity. All these years later, after countless reports, books, oral histories and documentary films have constructed a terrifyingly clear picture of the Third Reich’s vast machinery of murder, it’s difficult to grasp just how shocking these first revelations really were. The most horrific rumors about what was happening to the Jews and millions of other “undesirables” — Catholics, pacifists, homosexuals, and Slavs in Nazi-occupied lands — paled before the reality revealed by the liberation of the camps.

Here, seven decades after the April 1945 liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British troops, LIFE.com presents a series of photographs made at the camp by the great George Rodger (later a founding Magnum member). In an issue of LIFE published a few weeks later, in which several of the pictures in this gallery first appeared, the magazine told its readers of a “barbarism that reaches the low point of human degradation.”

Last week the jubilance of impending victory was sobered by the grim facts of the atrocities which the Allied troops were uncovering all over Germany. For 12 years since the Nazis seized power, American have heard charges of German brutality. Made skeptical by World War I “atrocity propaganda,” many people refused to put much faith in stories about the inhuman Nazi treatment of prisoners.

With the armies in Germany were four LIFE photographers. . . . The things [their photos] show are horrible. They are printed for the reason stated seven years ago when, in publishing early pictures of war’s death and destruction in Spain and China, LIFE stated, “Dead men will have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them.”

In Rodger’s own typed picture captions, meanwhile, dated April 20, 1945, the photographer detailed what he had witnessed when he accompanied the British 11th Armoured Division (the fabled “Black Bull”) into the camp just days earlier. Somehow, the stark, almost telegraphic language of the notes carries more power more immediacy and are thus more terrifying than so many of the passionate, outraged articles and editorials that appeared in newspapers and on the radio in the weeks and months to come. Here are just a few examples:

Ukrainian women cooking a meal on a refuse dump in the camp. For fuel for their fire they used the ragged clothing torn from corpses. They are boiling pine needles and roots to form a sort of soup.

There must be about 5,000 bodies in this grave. The former SS guards both women and men are made to collect them. . . . These girls, all between 20 and 25, were even worse than the men. They were more cruel. Authentic stories are told of how these [women] tied living people to the corpses and burned them alive.

SS girls and men working in the mass grave and unloading the dead from trucks. These girls seem to be completely indifferent to what they are doing . . . [but] the former tough SS men crack up under . . . the strain of continually handling the bodies of those they helped to kill.

This man was talking to me when he fell dead beside me.

Women dying under the trees.

Indelibly scarred by the savagery and suffering he confronted during World War II in England during the Blitz; in war-torn Southeast Asia and Europe; and, especially, in Bergen-Belsen George Rodger did not work as a war photographer again. He did, however, continue to travel and photograph around the world in the decades after the war particularly in Africa, where he made some of his most celebrated pictures.

By the time of his death in 1995, at the age of 87, Rodger was acknowledged as one of the 20th century’s indispensable photojournalists, and one of its greatest witnesses.

Bergen-Belsen 1945

George Rodger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Vlad the (Insect) Impaler: LIFE With Nabokov and His Butterflies

November 24, 2020April 12, 2013 by

On anyone’s list of the 20th century’s greatest writers never to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov will likely appear at, or very near, the top. Of course, one can point to any number of literary masters Graham Greene, Borges, Ibsen and others who were, inexplicably, passed over for the honor. But the exclusion of Nabokov is especially strange and, for his countless admirers, especially vexing in light of the sustained excellence of the novels (those written in Russian as well as in English), stories, poems and nonfiction that he produced across five full decades.

The scope of his influence, meanwhile, can hardly be overstated. Jhumpa Lahiri, Jeffrey Eugenides, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon, Thomas Pynchon the roster of prominent (and even a few genuinely great) writers whose work echoes or pays direct tribute to Nabokov’s genius is as long as it is varied.

But another passion long battled with his love of writing for preeminence in Nabokov’s life: namely, the study and collection of butterflies.

In a November 1964 article titled “The Master of Versatility,” LIFE took pains to remind its readers that Nabokov by that time an internationally celebrated novelist, translator and teacher was “much more than a many-tongued writer: Lepidoptera are butterflies and moths, and Nabokov is one of the world’s authorities on them.”

Here, LIFE.com presents a series of pictures made in and around Ithaca, N.Y., in 1958 by LIFE’s Carl Mydans that illustrate the man’s obsession with the colorful flying insects.

Born in Russia in 1899, Nabokov fled the Revolution at 17, studied at Cambridge, and went on to teach literature in the United States. (He became a naturalized American citizen in 1945.) In 1964, he was living in Montreux, Switzerland “writing,” LIFE noted in the 1964 article, “chasing butterflies and making brilliant conversation.”

Here, in exactly the sort of sharp, amusing and cheerfully acerbic language one might expect from the author of Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire and Bend Sinister, are just some of the remarks on life, art and, of course, butterflies that Nabokov shared with LIFE’s Jane Howard:

Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a pastime but I never expected it to be a source of income. I have often dreamed of a long and exciting career as a curator of Lepidoptera in a great museum.

One of the greatest pieces of charlatanic and satanic nonsense imposed on a gullible public is the Freudian interpretation of dreams…. I can not conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst, but of course if one’s mind is deranged on might try anything: after all, quacks and cranks, shamans and holy men, kings and hypnotists have cured people.

It is odd, and probably my fault, that no people seem to name their daughters Lolita anymore. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but no human beings.

I don’t think I shall ever go back [to Russia]. When I feel like returning to Russia, I go up to the mountains in pursuit of butterflies, and find just before the timberline a region that corresponds to the Russia of my youth.

I am indifferent to sculpture, architecture and music. When I go to a concert all that matters to me is the reflection of the hands of the pianist in the lacquer of the instrument. My mind wanders and fastens on trivia as whether I’ll have something good to read before I go to bed. Knowing you’ll have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.

One final note, this time on the pronunciation of Nabokov’s name. In a 1965 interview, Nabokov himself said: “Frenchmen of course say ‘Na-bo-koff‘ with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say ‘Na-bokov,’ accent on the first, and Italians say Na-bo-kov, accent in the middle, as Russians do … [with] a heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘Knickerbocker.’ The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism…. Incidentally, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer rhyming with ‘redeemer.'”

There. Aren’t you glad we cleared that up?

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.