By Joe Flaherty The New York Times March 13, 1977 In an interview after winning the Nobel Prize, Saul Bellow contended that most people don’t pay any mind to writers, and his assessment struck me as correct. This fact was bulldozed home to me in 1969 when, as a...
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic 2016 Back in 1998, magazine writer Mike Sager was best known for his fearless profiles of drug dealers, crackheads, porn stars, and neo-Nazis. But that year Esquire handed him a very different kind of assignment: Write about an old man....
By John Lardner True May 1954 Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast. That was in 1910. Up to 1907 the world at large had never heard of Ketchel. In the three...
By Scott Raab GQ July 1995 Lost inside a huge sweater and a baggy, low-slung pair of jeans, an oversized brown fedora slumped well down on his forehead, half walking, half leaning against a young woman with long brown hair, actor/boxer Mickey Rourke trudges down a...
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic August 2016 Robert Benton is best known as a screenwriter (Bonnie and Clyde, What’s Up Doc?,and Superman), and director (The Late Show, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Nobody’s Fool), but before he lost it at the movies, Benton was the art...
By John H. Richardson Premiere December 1997 “I’m getting bored here,” Cameron is saying. “I went for popcorn 10 minutes ago.” He is speaking into a handheld cordless microphone, his voice booming down from the astonishingly crisp overhead speakers like the voice of...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Around these parts, we are enormous Eve Babitz fans. Would we belong to a fan club? You bet we would. Proudly. If you don’t know from Babitz, not only is she a wonderful writer but she’s lived some kind of life, all of which is detailed...
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic 2016 Chip Brown has long been one of the finest magazine writers we have. An exacting reporter and a deft stylist, Brown began under the tutelage of David Maraniss and Bob Woodward at The Washington Post and flourished as feature writer...
By Steve Oney Los Angeles Magazine May 2005 “The boardwalk squeaks and out come the freaks,” declares Ian McShane, plainly including himself in the assortment of street preachers, panhandlers, and body builders gathered at Venice Beach on this foggy spring morning....
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic October 2016 Fame is fleeting in all pop culture—movies, music, writing, sports: today’s stars, tomorrow’s Where Are They Now’s. This feels especially true in journalism. Who but a small group of nonfiction-loving nerds pays attention to...
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic October 26, 2016 The story of Emmet Till is embedded in our public consciousness as one of the most notorious hate crimes of the century. What is lesser known—and what novelist John Edgar Wideman tackles with candor and humility in his...
By Stacy Title New York Woman October 1990 The very sight of Brooke Shields, the six-foot icon slash model slash actress, puts people into shock. Whatever they’re doing, they stop. Here in the Pan Am terminal at La Guardia, wearing a fitted, floral dress—magenta and...
