Check out 17 prints from famed fashion photographer Lillian Bassman, who died just last month, at Books & Books Miami Beach. Now through June 1.Bassman won acclaim in the 1940s and ’50s with high-contrast black-and-white portraits of models that had a dreamy quality. In the 1990s, she rediscovered a stash of lost negatives and emerged as a fine-art photographer.A new book of her work Lillian Bassman: Lingerie has just been published. As Ginia Bellafante put it in the New York Times recently, “In place of heavyset women constraining themselves in what was essentially equipment, Ms. Bassman deployed immeasurably lithe models, conveying a world in which women seemed to linger in the pleasures of their own sensuality.” Fifty years later, these images have lost none of their allure, and the enormous cultural impact of the TV show Mad Men has given them new currency.  1. It’s a Cinch, model: Carmen, Merry Widow by Warner’s, 1951, for Harper’s Bazaar, © Lillian Bassman  2. Southwest Passage—Sunset Pink, pajamas by Kickernick, 1951, for Harper’s Bazaar, © Lillian Bassman   3. The Line Lengthens, lingerie by Lily of France, 1955, for Harper’s Bazaar, © Lillian Bassman     4. Silo, Bra and Panties, 1948 (advertisement for Firestone Contro elastic yarn), © Lillian Bassman   

Lillian Hellman was a giant of twentieth-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author of The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist. In A Difficult Woman, renowned historian Alice Kessler-Harris undertakes a feat few would dare to attempt: a reclamation of a combative, controversial woman who straddled so many political and cultural fault lines of her time.