Mar 16, 2019 | 2000s, Essays, Peter Goldman, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Peter Goldman Introduction to The Attentive Eve, May 2002 New York City For our forty-two years together, I have been assuring Helen Dudar that she ought to do a book. For forty-two years, she has assured me that she should not. My argument, reduced to its...
Mar 3, 2019 | 1980s, Features, Pete Dexter, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Pete Dexter Playboy, September 1985 Nobody knows exactly when the quiet man turned the corner—they don’t call him the quiet man for nothing—but somewhere along the line, Doug Campbell, a ten-year reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, came to a point in his life...
Feb 26, 2019 | 2010s, Interviews, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic, August 2016 Lynn Darling was a bright and lively presence at Esquire from the mid-’80s through the late-‘90s. She wrote smart, observant celebrity profiles of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Brokaw, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Linda Fiorentino....
Feb 12, 2019 | 1970s, Essays, Joe Flaherty, The Arts, The Literary Life
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...
Jan 17, 2019 | 2010s, Alex Belth, Interviews, Movies, The Arts, The Literary Life
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...
Dec 15, 2018 | 2010s, Alex Belth, Editor's Notes, ESQUIRE, Movies, The Arts, The Literary Life
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...
Oct 8, 2018 | 1970s, Diane K. Shah, Profiles, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Diane Shah The National Observer, May 20, 1976 I came from this incredibly high-powered family. My mother was sort of a Viking. Very bright, and utterly contemptuous of everyone else. When I told her I had read The Three Musketeers, she said, “undoubtedly a waste...
Aug 7, 2018 | 1970s, Features, Gail Sheehy, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Gail Sheehy Rolling Stone, July 14, 1977 November 20th, 1976, a Saturday night, Clay Felker, the New York magazine publisher, invited Rupert Murdoch, the Australian publisher, to dine at Elaine’s to celebrate the announcement that had hit New York by surprise the...
Jul 22, 2018 | 1980s, J. Anthony Lukas, Profiles, The Arts, The Literary Life
By J. Anthony Lukas GQ, Dec 1984 Anonymous in their green Ford Fairmont, the plainclothesmen pull to the casino door and beckon three men into the backseat. Nosing into midday traffic, they head for the Italian community along North Georgia Avenue. “That’s where he...
May 18, 2018 | 1980s, Book Excerpts, Richard Kluger, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Richard Kluger From The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, 1986 Of all James Bellows’s efforts to strengthen the Tribune, none was more striking than his willingness to take chances on new young writers, whom he encouraged to work in whatever...
May 16, 2018 | 1980s, Criticism, James Wolcott, The Arts, The Literary Life
By James Woolcott The New York Review of Books, November 4, 1982 The Purple Decades: A Reader by Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 396 pp., $17.50 Not since Garry Wills uncorked his rather fanciful notions on the origins of the cold war in the opening pages of...
May 16, 2018 | Alex Belth, Editor's Notes, The Arts, The Literary Life
Tom Wolfe died a couple of days ago and if you have never read his entertaining and much-celebrated non-fiction, well, now is as good a time as any to dig in. Start with the relatively straight-forward “The Marvelous Mouth of Cassius Clay” featured in the October 1963...
