Anecdotal Evidence

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...

“By all accounts,” writes Erik Bader, “[Guy Davenport] wrote a legit stack of letters every single day, and would respond to literally anyo...

As the human world seems to grow more chaotic, as though entropy were finally triumphant, I look for evidence of pattern and design in natur...

“I believe that it behooves the living, for our own sake, to keep the memory of the dead alive and vivid . . .”   That’s William Maxwell i...

“A dull country magistrate gave Johnson a long tedious account of his exercising his criminal jurisdiction, the result of which was his havi...

Among my teachers when I was young was a man I never met. In fact, he had died several years before I enrolled in his school. Oscar Williams...

I had seen the phrase before and guessed correctly at its meaning from context but still found the expression puzzling: “widow’s weeds.” It ...

A pivot or lasting change of focus occurred to me as a teenager. For years, since probably late toddlerhood, I had thought of myself as a bu...

In a letter to his friend the Rev. William Unwin, written in March 1784, nine months before Dr. Johnson’s death, William Cowper says he is “...

Walter Jackson Bate tells us in his biography of Dr. Johnson that as he aged, the crusty old man mellowed. “[I]n many ways,” Bate writes, “h...