Anecdotal Evidence

Much of my working life was spent among writers indifferent to the precision, clarity and stylishness of what they wrote. They flung words o...

An old friend, just months older than me, is taking longevity hard. We’re not that old – he just turned seventy-four, I’m still seventy-thr...

While reading Sir Thomas Browne again it occurred to me that an epidemic of envy seems to be loose in the land. Envy is an emotion I like to...

Nearly forty years ago I drove to Beaversprite , a nature reserve near Dolgeville in upstate New York, in the foothills of the Adirondacks, ...

Few of us knew of the American poet Catherine Breese Davis (1924-2002). She was a lost soul, little more than a rumor among readers. Her aca...

Isaac Waisberg of IWP Books introduced me to the work of Erwin Chargaff three years ago. Chargaff was a German-born biochemist who fled Hi...

“Every book I read is a not altogether negligible portion of my lifetime reading. Why did I not follow a careful program? Why did I give fre...