Andy Warhol was making ends meet by working as a freelance children’s book illustrator for Doubleday. Still, he was unable to escape poverty. When his mother, Julia Warhola  an artist herself and one of history’s unsung champions behind creative icons found out about her son’s destitute conditions in 1952, she boarded a bus from Pittsburgh to New York and moved into Andy’s tiny apartment on East 75th Street, intent on taking care of him and helping him get by. The two shared a love of cats so strong that their squalid home was populated by a multitude of felines, all but one named Sam; the sole outlier, Julia’s most beloved companion, was named Hester. But in addition to cat-rearing, the mother-son cohabitation inevitably led to a series of creative collaborations and an adventure of self-publishing.