By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader July 2, 2019 Julian Allen is one of our favorite magazine illustrators. He made a splash in England in the late ’60s and then arrived in New York during the Watergate era. For the next twenty plus years his work was a fixture in the...
By E. Jean Carroll Playboy February 1986 “Check this out.” He pulls back the cover. “Oh, my God!” I say. His hair flops down like a veal cutlet. “You gotta look at it from this side.” “Oh, my Lord!” I shout. “Is this cool, or what?” says John. We are standing 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 Brock Brower The New York Times August 6, 1978 Meryl Streep and Raul Julia are rehearsing The Taming of the Shrew seated on two studio chairs in a rehearsal room at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. Act II, Scene 1, when Kate and Petruchio meet and clash for the first...
By Helen Dudar The Wall Street Journal September 30, 1987 A few summers ago, Toni Morrison looked out at the Hudson River from the little pier of her house in Rockland County and discovered that she was feeling dizzy. She had, at the urging of her editor at Knopf,...
By Leonard Shecter Look October 19, 1971 The scene called for Billy Tully, played by Stacey Keach, to be thinning and weeding young tomatoes under a broiling sun. It’s sweaty, backbreaking working that must, because of the delicacy required, be done with a short,...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Robert Weaver is one of my favorite illustrators. He worked in magazines from the mid-’50s through the ’80s and taught drawing at SVA for years. He had a beautifully direct, strong style—he could draw his ass off. There is a rough,...
By Phillip Lopate New York Woman November 1989 Pauline Kael has just turned seventy. An important birthday; her house in the Berkshires is filled with flowers from well-wishers. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea that there are always this many flowers around,”...
By Grover Lewis Playboy 1975 The midmorning sky over the Oregon State Hospital in Salem looks liverish, quiverish, ready to collapse with torrential rain at any second. On the crewcut lawn behind the main building, an orderly shoos his excursion troupe of exercising...
By Seymour Krim Harper’s February 1981 It’s sad to say it, but Frank MacShane’s new biography of John O’Hara (The Life of John O’Hara) is a hell of a lot more interesting for us today, and makes a better novel, than practically all the fourteen novels O’Hara ever...
By Pete Hamill Art & Antiques May 1990 New York was full of swaggering energy in the spring of 1958, when I was living over a secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue and Twelfth Street, still trying to be a painter. It was a town where everyone was working, nobody...
