How We Lived on It (37) – “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”

I was explaining to a friend the other day why I think James Agee to be, if not a great writer, a writer of great distinction. While Agee’s life was too short (he died at 45) to provide the scope necessary for considerations of greatness, he certainly possessed the sheer talent – the prose chops. […]

Politics and Art

Vladimir Nabokov did not like the novel of ideas. Artists often have their idiosyncratic dislikes, contrary expressions of the unique aesthetic vision that drives their own work. Particularly, Nabokov did not like the work of those monuments of great-idea novels, Dostoyevsky and Mann, though there is no reason his distaste should have excluded the novels […]