By Ernie Pyle Scripps-Howard Wire Service July 13, 1944 IN NORMANDY—(by wireless)—Lieut. Orion Shockley came over with a map and explained to us just what his company was going to do. There was a German strong point of pillboxes and machine-gun nests about half a mile...
By Loren Feldman GQ February 1990 First, he pointed the gun at his own head. “What? In front of your kids?” she said. Then, he pointed it at her head. “You’re not going to do that,” she said. The first shot went through her neck. She tried to run, but he pursued her...
By David Owen Esquire February 1981 Men prefer four things to women: fast cars, guns, camping equipment “tested on the slopes of Everest,” and the World Series. This is a thought-provoking list and good as far as it goes. But lately there’s been a fifth contender: a...
By Ivan Solotaroff The Village Voice September 4, 1990 By the banks of the Truckee River, under a nearly full moon, a tall, vaguely Hispanic-looking man with beautiful shoulder-length black hair, a foot-long beard, and a plump, perfectly relaxed body comes over to...
By Juan Williams The Washington Post Magazine May 17, 1987 When I was a little boy, the one event I dreamed of seeing in person was a big prizefight. Other sports were on television or available to a kid who wanted to sell Cokes. The big fights were in exotic places...
By John H. Richardson Premiere October 1989 Joel and Ethan Coen’s new movie, Miller’s Crossing, opens with an oddly poignant shot of a hat blowing through an autumn forest. A little later, Tom, the hero, tells Verna, his mistress, that he dreamed he was walking in the...
By Steve Oney Esquire September 1985 Under the cover of the lengthening shadows of a sleepy August afternoon in 1915, five Model T’s loaded with armed men quietly departed the northwest Atlanta suburb of Marietta. The men had told their wives they were going fishing....
By John Lardner From White Hopes and Other Tigers 1951 Hell’s Kitchen, the region west of Eighth Avenue around the Forties, won its name many years ago and continued to deserve it until about the time the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed. Things are different there...
By Nik Cohn Inside Sports February 1981 In Atlantic City, Willie Mays played an elderly game, serving as designated greeter at Bally’s Park Place Hotel. After the fracas of his hiring, when Bowie Kuhn barred him from baseball, he settled into a gentle routine of...
By Edwin Shrake Harper’s February 1970 For about five hours I had been drinking Scotch whiskey and arguing with a rather nice, sometimes funny old fellow named Arch, who was so offended by my moderately long hair that he had demanded to know if I weren’t actually,...
By E. Jean Carroll Esquire April 1992 Thus spoke the whole of womankind. —Honoré de Balzac “I mean, this guy, I walked in his hotel room one day, and he had on a towel…. Am I lying?” says Miss Boyd. “This man, his body. He played for the Bulls. Oh! This man had...
By Pat Jordan GQ April 1988 He was just another bum bleeding to death in an alleyway at four o’clock in the morning. He lay motionless on the concrete, as if sleeping, his tangled shoulder-length hair ringed by a halo of blood. He lay there peacefully for a while, in...
