CategoryBIOGRAPHY

My discovery of Juan Rulfo – like that of Kafa – will without doubt be an essential chapter in my memoirs. I had arrived in Mexico on the same day Ernest Hemingway pulled the trigger – the 2nd of July 1961 – and not only had I not read Juan Rulfo’s books, I hadn’t even heard of him. It was very strange: first of all because in those days I kept up to date with the latest goings on in the literary...

There is an old joke about a confession. “Father, I must confess that I’ve sinned,” a man tells the priest, “I’m guilty of stealing.” The priest asks, “What did you steal?” “Well, a ham,” says the man. “What did you do with it?” Confusedly, the man responds, “I hid it under the bridge outside town.” “Well, just leave it there and say three Our Fathers for your penance.” He left the ham and said...

To study Nicolas Cages rise is also to study Francis Ford Coppolas fall from grace. You cannot write about one without the other. In the early to mid-80s, their trajectories were almost conversely linkedCage siphoning power from his uncles desperate need to work, like Michael Corleone growing stronger with the Godfathers faltering health. Except it wasnt Coppolas physical health that was...

Here is Rosebud Yellow Robe, a confident, handsome gentlewoman in early middle-age, looking off to her right, apparently indifferent to her portraitist. She wears a loose elk-skin ceremonial dress with beaded figures of cavalrymen and warriors worked in on fine sinew. It is a representation of the Battle of Little Bighorn, in which her grandfather had fought. If you were a child in New York in...

It’s odd to think that this history of artist David Edward Byrd started with a trip to the bathroom… but it did. However, this visit to the john was far removed from much of the history youre about to read. It didnt take place in the artist hatchery of 1960s Carnegie Tech (later Carnegie Mellon University), where Byrd studied. It wasnt among the grimy streets of New York, where Byrd first created...

An extended community nurtured the achievements of The Sisterhood. Many other Black feminist groups and individual intellectuals in the 1970s and early 1980s shared The Sisterhoods goals of publication and publicity for Black women writers, as well as the belief that political and social change could and should be made through culture. In this larger network of Black women literary activists, the...

There has always been a gap between the English-language author Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Yiddish writer who published under at least three pseudonyms: Yitskhok Bashevis, Yitskhok Varshavski, and D. Segal. The publication of Singers wartime writings presents one of the first attempts to close that gap. Singers Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939-1945, the first of three...

The beautiful word Shenandoah, of unknown Native American origin, stands for a river and an opulently green valley. Willa Cathers Virginia forebears on both sides had been there for four generations. Winchester township, seat of Frederick County, lies along the old turnpike between North and South and repeatedly changed hands in the course of the Civil War. Willas grandfather William Cather, of...

I first heard of Willa Cather as a teenage bookseller in North Denver, at a new, used, rare, and antiquarian bookshop that had once been a mechanics garage. At the bookstore, there was an entire section of Cathers famous works, which I had labeled meticulously with colored markers on scraps of printer paper. I dont remember hearing of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Instead, I sold heaps of used...

The first glimpse of a new, American approach to Austen appeared without fanfare in the reference volume A Brief Handbook of English Authors (1883/4), compiled by Oscar Fay Adams (1855–1919). In its entirety, Adams’s entry for Austen reads: Austen, Jane. 1775–1817. Novelist. Author of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Emma, The Watsons, and...