The Notorious Libby Holman

By Jon Bradshaw Vanity Fair March, 1985 When Libby Holman arrived in Manhattan in 1924, it was a bold and brassy town, devoted to the pleasure of pleasing itself. Prohibition—“the Great Foolishness,” as the gossip columnist Lucius Beebe called it—was in effect, but it...

What Might Have Been

By Ron Rapoport From The Immortal Bobby: Bobby Jones and the Golden Age of Golf 2005   Sometime after Augusta National, the home of the Masters, became one of the most famous golf courses in the world, it was suggested that a statue of its founder, Bobby Jones,...

Hitler Continued

By Ron Rosenbaum LARB June 10, 2014 RON ROSENBAUM’S 1998 book, Explaining Hitler, is a critique of “Hitler studies,” the term coined by Don DeLillo, and it remains for me a key experience in my life-long reading about the Third Reich. In the book Rosenbaum assessed...

I’ve Got the South in My Mouth

By Helen Lawrenson From The Hussy’s Handbook 1944 Every once in a while when I am in a nightclub—which is not any oftener than I get asked—I look around me and am suddenly stupefied by the swift, sudden spectacle of women all over the place bending every nerve and...

Why I Hate Parties

By Helen Lawrenson From The Hussy’s Handbook 1944 In the George Kaufman-Moss Hart drama, Merrily We Roll Along, there was a scene depicting a typical smart New York party. In one corner sits a very stewed lady. As another guest wanders near her, she looks up at him...

Have I Got Glamour?

By Helen Lawrenson From The Hussy’s Handbook 1944 A short time ago I had occasion to look into my magic mirror, which I had bought from a secondhand fairy godmother but had never gotten around to hanging up on account of the walls in my apartment were made of brick...

Steve Dalkowski

By Ron Shelton From Cult Baseball Players 1990 It was a groundskeeper in Stockton who first told me about Steve Dalkowski, the fastest pitcher of all time. Dalko once threw the ball through the wooden boards of the right-field fence, he said. The groundskeeper studied...

Intellectual, Go ’Way

By Helen Lawrenson From The Hussy’s Handbook 1944 Offhand, I can’t think of anything I don’t like as much as I don’t like intellectuals. I suppose they have their uses, the same as adversity and the study of Latin verbs—but they are accordingly as unpleasant and as...

Helen—An Introduction

By Nora Ephron from The Attentive Eve May 2002 The first time I heard about Helen Dudar, I was working at Newsweek magazine as a fact-checker in the National Affairs department. A new writer named Peter Goldman had just arrived at the magazine from St. Louis, and he...

A-Hunting We Will Go

By Donald Hall From The Country of Baseball 1976 Dock Ellis is moderately famous for throwing at batters. On May 1, 1974, he tied a major league record by hitting three batters in a row. They were the first three batters up, in the first inning. They were Cincinnati...

I Cover the Waterfront

By Max Miller From I Cover the Waterfront: Stories from the San Diego Shore 1932 Joyce Wadler got her start at the old New York Post, later wrote for The Washington Post, and was at the New York Times for many years. When she was at the Times would give young...

Dean Smith

By Will Blythe From To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever 2007 Soon after I returned to Chapel Hill , I had arranged to visit with Dean Smith, the former North Carolina head coach. I dressed up for the occasion, although these days the journalist in me had become...