Louis Begley’s books include Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters and the novels Wartime Lies and most recently Schmidt Steps Back. The essay in the April 5, 2012 issue was delivered in a somewhat different form as the opening address at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2001.
Books
Memoirs of Montparnasse
Finding college life “depressing…to a point where [he] could not go on” John “Buffy” Glassco decamped for Paris. Forty years later, he reconstructed this memoir à clef of his rollicking youth among the haute bohemians of the day, including Hemingway, Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Kay Boyle.
The Other House
The savage conclusion of The Other House makes it one of the most disturbing and memorable of Henry James’s depictions of the uncontrollable passions that lie beneath the polished veneer of civilized life.