Irving Sandler's career began with a fortuitous encounter with Franz Kline's Chief in the Museum of Modern Art in New York around 1952, a painting that moved him deeply and as he said, changed his life. He began to meet artists and soon became immersed in the then-small avant-garde New York art world, becoming the manager of the Tenth Street Tanager Gallery, the first artist-cooperative, and running the Artists Club (founded by first-generation Abstract Expressionists) between 1955 and 1962. By 1956 Sandler had begun to write art criticism for Art News, and subsequently for other major art journals, as well as a weekly art column for the New York Post. He came to know and to interview so many artists and in such depth that he was called the "recording angel" of the New York art world (by Carter Ratcliff in New York Magazine in 1978}, and the "balayeur des artistes," the sweeper-up of artists (by Frank O'Hara in a poem of 1964). On behalf of contemporary artists, he co-founded Artists Space (1972), now the longest running non-profit exhibition space in New York. He was also instrumental in the development of the program of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, which provides studio space in New York to artists (now the Sharpe-Walentas Studios) and continues to serve on its advisory committee.

During the time when the events in this novel took place Sandler himself lived on Second Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Street. Sandler (B.A., Temple University, M.A., University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D., New York University) is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Purchase College, State University of New York, where, in addition to teaching generations of art students, he also served for a short time as the director of the Neuberger Museum. His numerous publications include four surveys of art since World War II: The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970), The New York School: Painters and Sculptors of the 1950s (1978), American Art of the 1960s (1988), and Art of the Postmodern Era: From the late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996). He has also written A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir (2003); From Avant-Garde to Pluralism: An On-The-Spot History (2006); Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience (2009); a second memoir, Swept Up by Art, An Art Critic in the Post-Avant-Garde Era (2015); and monographs on Alex Katz, Al Held, and Mark di Suvero (all artists whose early exhibitions took place in Tenth Street galleries), among others. He is a former president and current board member of the American Section of the International Association of Art Critics. He was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 and in 2008, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Art Criticism from the International Association of Art Critics.