James Tuttleton was a literary critic and professor of English at New York University, known for his scholarship on American literature. He contributed literary essays and book reviews to The Weekly Standard in 1996, covering authors such as John Dos Passos and Alan Isler.
As a writer, the novelist John Dos Passos wanted to be "the architect of history." The trio of novels he called U.S.A., much esteemed in their day but neglected in the years after Dos Passos's death in 1970, were an effort to rebuild the recent past in a condensed and dramatic form. Dos Passos…
In 1994, Alan Isler published The Prince of West End Avenue, a hilarious first novel about a zany production of Hamlet in the "Emma Lazarus," an Upper West Side Jewish retirement home. So engaging were Isler's ambulatory octogenarians and so nutty were their theatrical schemings that the book,…
In 1994, Alan Isler published The Prince of West End Avenue, a hilarious first novel about a zany production of Hamlet in the "Emma Lazarus," an Upper West Side Jewish retirement home. So engaging were Isler's ambulatory octogenarians and so nutty were their theatrical schemings that the book,…
Imagine yourself a tough, widowed, sixty-something Western rancher -- Atticus Cody -- with two sons who are polar opposites: Frank, a successful businessman and a state senator with a large family; and Scott, an irresponsible thirty-something drifter whose bad driving caused the death, several…