Requiem for a Heavyweight
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When Jacques Barzun, freshly armed with a Ph.D. in 1932, announced that he intended to write a history of Europe, the director of the Bibliothèque Nationale took him aside. “Wait until you’re eighty,”...
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Prepare yourself: you cannot be both a Coleridgean and a Hazlittean. I’m sorry, but it needed to be said. This doesn’t mean that you can’t like both “Kubla Khan” and “The Indian Jugglers,” but...
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No one knows how he came to Istanbul: whether he caught the Orient Express in Munich or drove from Marburg to Genoa and boarded a ship for Athens. We know that he arrived in September, 1936, and was...
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People evidently liked to touch Frances Kroll Ring. As secretary and assistant to F. Scott Fitzgerald toward the end of his life, Mrs. Ring, who died on June 18th, at the age of ninety-nine, might well...
View ArticleThe Day Muhammad Ali Punched Me
On June 4, 1991, at approximately 3:45 P.M., Muhammad Ali punched me in the face—not in the ring but on a Trailways bus cruising along Interstate 78—and I deserved it. I had boarded the bus earlier...
View ArticleRequiem for a Heavyweight
There is no abstract available for this article, but its contents are reflected in the displayed keywords.
View ArticleWho Speaks For the Lazy?
REFLECTIONS about writer’s laziness... For a white American male, in good health and in possession of an advanced degree from an Ivy League school, I …
View ArticleFive Centuries’ Worth of Facts on the Best-Seller List
Talk story about Jacques Barzun... When Jacques Barzun, freshly armed with a Ph.D. in 1932, announced that he intended to write a history of Europe, the …
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