By Gary Smith Life October 1987 The guide cupped his eyes against the sunlight and watched the man pick his way up the cliff. Where to? he wondered. Why? Their raft had ridden out the rapids and reached a place where the river rested. There the group of vacationing...
By Seymour Krim From Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer, 1961 Until this time of complete blast-off in seemingly every department of human life, the idea of insanity was thought of as the most dreadful thing that could happen to a person. Little was actually known...
By Dan Wakefield The Nation October, 1955 The crowds are gone and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it. Citizens who drink from the “Whites Only” fountain in the...
By Helen Dudar The Wall Street Journal October 4, 1988 Paris So here we are, a couple of American women lunching at the restaurant of Guy Savoy, two stars in the Michelin, four toques in the fervidly celebratory Guide Gault-Millau. Naturally, in keeping with local...
By Ernie Pyle Scripps-Howard Wire Service June 12, 1944 NORMANDY BEACHHEAD—(by wireless)—Due to a last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn’t arrive on the beachhead until the morning after D-day, after our first wave of assault troops had hit the shore. By...
By Joyce Wadler Harper’s July 1973 I am on the phone with Robert Kushner, a 23-year-old conceptual artist who makes clothes out of food, and we are having a discussion about what he will design for me. “I’d love to make you something in asparagus,” he says. “I could...
By Ron Rosenbaum The New York Times Magazine January 15, 1995 One afternoon in the late 1970’s, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney...
By Joyce Wadler Harper’s February 1974 More than one person has suggested that if, in these times of troubled Presidential credibility and general bad faith, anyone wanted to get to the bottom of the Watergate affair really fast, he could just ask the telephone...
By Ron Rosenbaum Harper’s March 1978 Did anyone ever tell you about the last letter of Our Lady of Fatima? It’s more than a dozen years since the night it was revealed to me, but I remember the circumstances exactly. I was in an all-night place called the Peter Pan...
By Ron Rosenbaum Esquire October 1971 The Blue Box Is Introduced: Its Qualities Are Remarked I am in the expensively furnished living room of Al Gilbertson*, the creator of the “blue box.” Gilbertson is holding one of his shiny black-and-silver “blue boxes”...
By Charles P. Pierce GQ February 1996 The walking dream is of a dead city. It comes upon me when I forget where the car is parked, or to pick up milk along with the bread, or that one of the greatest female impersonators of our time is also named Charles Pierce. I can...
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...
