Robert M. Adams (1915-1996) was a founding editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Rutgers, Cornell and U.C.L.A. His scholarly interested ranged from Milton to Joyce, and his translations of many classic works of French literature continue to be read to this day.
Alfred Kazin’s modest memoir, Writing Was Everything, marks its author’s entry into his ninth decade. This, if ever, is a proper time to summarize and retrospect. (I remember the surprise with which I learned that my classmate and coeval at Columbia College, Thomas Merton, had written and published to acclaim …
Under the gleaming neon sign that reads HONEST JOHN, USED CAR SALESMAN you’re sure of at least one thing. Nobody advertises himself or his product as “honest” who doesn’t have very good reason to know that people will expect the contrary. Ann Douglas of Columbia University titles her new book …
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
by Harold Bloom
The project is formidable, and to be approached from below, while one looks up to it: nothing less than an explanation and defense of the Western world’s literary tradition from beginning to end, supposing it has either beginning or end. To encompass the outline is one thing; to fill in …
The author of four substantial scholarly books, numerous editorial interventions, and various critical articles, Anne Barton is a lucid and witty writer whose learning is both extensive and solidly grounded. Though born in America and a graduate of Bryn Mawr, she has lived and worked most of her adult life …
Donald Hall’s brief memoir, Life Work, is, as he himself declares, a bit of a brag about the amount of work—poems, books, lectures—he has been able to accomplish since giving up an academic job. On this point he can expect widespread corroboration from graybeards scattered around the country. An awful …
Though in colloquial usage it’s become something else, a guy began as a dummy, something to kick around, and out of a number of such masculine boobies, Garrison Keillor has made a book. Keillor has done sketches of this nature for rectial on television—he is best known as the laureate …
The crucial event of Norman Maclean’s last book (he died in 1990) was a forest fire in the rugged western mountains of Montana. The fire took place in August of 1949; Maclean, who was then and had been for years a member of the department of English at the University …
Jim Crace is a British writer who has just published his third work of fiction without having made much impression in his first two. This seems likely to change soon. Born in London in 1946 but resident in Birmingham, Crace is apparently tied to no literary group of academic or …