Arbus, Doon

Doon Arbus (born April 3, 1945) is an American writer and journalist. Her debut novel is The Caretaker (New Directions, 2020). Her play, Third Floor, Second Door on the Right, was produced at the Cherry Lane Theatre by the 2003 New York International Fringe Festival. Doon Arbus is the elder daughter of actor Allan Arbus and photographer Diane Arbus, and the great-granddaughter of Russeks co-founder Frank Russek. She was 26 when her mother committed suicide, at which time she became responsible for the management of her mother's estate. She has authored or contributed to five books on Diane Arbus's work, including An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 1972) and Revelations (Random House, 2003). She has also organized numerous photographic exhibitions in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Jeu de Paume, among other institutions. As a freelance journalist in the mid-1960s, alongside other writers like Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Robert Benton, she contributed to the New York Herald Tribune's Sunday supplement, New York, one of the earliest proponents of New Journalism. Her articles also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Nation, and Cheetah. Her 1966 New York Herald Tribune article "James Brown Is Out of Sight" was among the first profiles of the R&B legend and is included in The James Brown Reader (Plume, 2008). Arbus was a longtime collaborator of Richard Avedon, with whom she coauthored the books Alice in Wonderland: The Forming of a Company, the Making of a Play (E. P. Dutton, 1973) and Avedon: The Sixties (Random House, 1999).