The Faith of Graffiti is the classic, definitive look at the birth of graffiti as an art form, pairing the fascinating 1974 essay by Norman Mailer—National Book Award and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner’s Song—with the stunning, iconic photography of internationally acclaimed photographer Jon Naar. Back in print for the first time in three decades and expanded with 32 pages of additional photos, The Faith of Graffiti is a landmark in the history of street art: an essential, contemporary, and still-relevant meditation, in words and pictures, on the meaning of identity, property, and city life.

"The Faith is the bible of graffiti. It forever captures the place, the time, and the writings of those of us who made it happen." —Snake I

In 1973, author Norman Mailer teamed with photographer Jon Naar to produce The Faith of Graffiti, a fearless exploration of the birth of the street art movement in New York City. The book coupled Mailer's essay on the origins and importance of graffiti in modern urban culture with Naar's radiant, arresting photographs of the young graffiti writers' work. The result was a powerful, impressionistic account of artistic ferment on the streets of a troubled and changing city—and an iconic documentary record of a critical body of work now largely lost to history.

This new edition of The Faith of Graffiti, the first in more than three decades, brings this vibrant work—the seminal document on the origins of street art—to contemporary readers. Photographer Jon Naar has enhanced the original with thirty-two pages of additional photographs that are new to this edition, along with an afterword in which he reflects on the project and the meaning it has taken on in the intervening decades. It stands now, as it did then, as a rich survey of a group of outsider artists and the body of work they created—and a provocative defense of a generation that questioned the bounds of authority over aesthetics.