Do we need another biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald? Since Arthur Mizener's inaugural one of 1951, there have been a number of successors including Andrew Turnbull's (1962) and, most commandingly, Matthew Bruccoli's "standard" one of 1981. This new one by David S. Brown concentrates, as the blurb…
Do we need another biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald? Since Arthur Mizener's inaugural one of 1951, there have been a number of successors including Andrew Turnbull's (1962) and, most commandingly, Matthew Bruccoli's "standard" one of 1981. This new one by David S. Brown concentrates, as the blurb…
One of the quieter celebrations of a literary centennial may be the one for Prufrock and Other Observations, T. S. Eliot's first book of poems, published in 1917.
Thomas Hardy died in 1928 and immediately precipitated a most tangled crisis, namely, how and where to inter him. Hardy’s will specified that he wished to be buried in Stinsford churchyard in his native Dorset; but influential London literary friends pushed for a public ceremony and burial in the…
Remember Existentialism? I heard about it, first, back in the early 1950s on a boat full of students bound for Europe. Among the many planned daily activities was a discussion about this exciting new way of thinking. It seemed to involve, centrally, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (always in that…
Remember Existentialism? I heard about it, first, back in the early 1950s on a boat full of students bound for Europe. Among the many planned daily activities was a discussion about this exciting new way of thinking. It seemed to involve, centrally, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (always in that…
Norman Mailer entered Harvard in the fall of 1939, just as World War II began. His famous novel about part of that war, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948, and at age 25, like Lord Byron, he awoke to find himself famous. Sixty years later, looking back on the book’s immense success—it…
The recent appearance of two generically related novels by Louis Begley justifies a look back at the career of this extraordinary writer. Or rather, his second career since his first was as partner in the New York corporate law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton.
The recent appearance of two generically related novels by Louis Begley justifies a look back at the career of this extraordinary writer. Or rather, his second career since his first was as partner in the New York corporate law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton.
Ted Gioia has established himself in the forefront of contemporary writers about jazz. The Imperfect Art (1988) is a short collection of essays about the form; The History of Jazz (2011) provides a fair-minded survey of the art, from Buddy Bolden to Wynton Marsalis; most recently, The Jazz…
Although Edward St. Aubyn has received handsome praise from a number of more than respectable novelists and critics, my sense is that he is still something of a secret, less known than he should be to readers who try to keep up with contemporary fiction.
There is a sequence in Terry Southern’s first novel, Flash and Filigree (1958), that features a TV show called What's My Disease? It is Southern's version of the once-popular Sunday night show called What's My Line?, during which a panel of four attempted to guess the identity of a mystery guest.
In one of Kingsley Amis's novels, the protagonist, Garnet Bowen, comes across his wife in the kitchen, helping their child into its coat to the accompaniment of "a song sung very loudly and badly" by Frank Sinatra: "You came, you saw, you conquered me," Sinatra sang.
Although I was a frequenter of burlesque in its last days, with its comedians, strippers, and feeble orchestra—the Casino Theater in Boston was a good escape from the toils of graduate English at Harvard—I knew little about its more dignified ancestor, the Ziegfeld Follies. So this account…
Saul Bellow died in 2005, a few years after he was accorded full biographical treatment by the critic James Atlas. In 700 pages, Atlas provided a crisply written, fair-minded account of the novelist and fellow Chicagoan up through the publication of his final book, Ravelstein (2000). With some…
The title of Morris Dickstein’s memoir alludes to an often-quoted line from Robert Lowell’s epilogue to his last book of poems, Day by Day. “Yet why not say what happened?” is Lowell’s question to himself as he prays for “the grace of accuracy.” Dickstein, emeritus professor at CUNY Graduate Center…
Why should I, an elderly literary gent who spends much of his time reading, talking, and writing about Shakespeare or W. B. Yeats, spend an hour every weekday watching a soap opera? How odd is it that after a hardworking class teasing out the syntax and ambiguities of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale,…
It's polemical title leaves us in no doubt of what to expect from this book. William Deresiewicz has written a passionate attack on everything that’s wrong with today’s elite universities and colleges and the credentialed students who attend them. He terms it “a letter to my twenty-year-old self,”…
Terry Teachout is a remarkable man of letters whose interest in the arts is multi-directed. Officially, he serves as drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and has reported on theater performances all over the country. He is also critic at large for Commentary, where he publishes a regular column…
There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.
In one of the most charming moments of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957), our hero is about to be visited by a 14-year-old American boy, son of Pnin’s former (and dreadful) wife and her fraudulent lover, Dr. Eric Wind. Pnin wonders what gifts of welcome he can give young Victor, and decides that along…
There have always been readers of John Updike’s work who find his most impressive achievement to be his short fiction rather than his novels.
Of the generation of American poets born in the 1920s, three are preeminent: Richard Wilbur (b. 1921), Anthony Hecht (b. 1923), and James Merrill (b. 1926). This judgment will, of course, be contested by those who are most excited by the high nonsense of a John Ashbery, the manic improvisations of…
The death of Evan S. Connell last month prompts reflection on an American original who, over a lifetime of steady work—many volumes of novels, stories, biography, essayistic speculations—left as his permanent contribution to letters one brilliant, memorable book: the novel Mrs. Bridge, published in…
Ted Gioia, who recently published an excellent History of Jazz, now turns his attention to classic instances of that art. As a pianist and teacher of jazz piano, Gioia often wished, he writes, for a “handbook to this body of music, a single volume that would guide me through the jazz repertoire and…
Among the scholarly and critical books that continue to crowd the Henry James shelf in university libraries, this new one by Michael Anesko deserves a significant place. Monopolizing the Master tells the story of what happened to Henry James’s legacy after his death in England in 1916 at the age of…
The Dickens bicentenary is nearly upon us (he was born in February 1812), and he will not lack for biographical attention. Over the past decade there has been much scholarly activity on his behalf: the completion of 12 volumes of letters; a four-volume edition of his journalism; continuing…
The Forgotten Founding Father Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture by Joshua Kendall Putnam’s, 368 pp., $26.95
The Notebooks of