By Helen Dudar Esquire January, 1976 Before she became Pauline Kael, before she was much more than a wonderful surprise occasionally encountered in obscure journals, before she was canonized as America’s best critic of film, Pauline Kael took an ax to the work of...
By Dan Wakefield The New York Times July 21, 1968 Both as a novelist (Run River, 1963) and as a reporter and essayist, Joan Didion is one of the least celebrated and most talented writers of my own generation (“Silent,” B.A.’s circa mid-1950’s). Her first collection...
By Helen Dudar The New York Times December 15, 1985 Uta Hagen Acting, Acting, in ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profeesion’… Since Uta Hagen is one of the glories of the American theater and since she turns up infrequently in large public performance spaces, she is subject to a...
By Will Blythe The New York Times June 15, 2008 On May 16, 1955, James Agee, 45, died of a heart attack in a New York City taxicab while on the way to his doctor’s office. Elegized by the critic Dwight Macdonald as a literary James Dean, he left behind an...
By Will Blythe The New York Times November 4, 2001 At 59, the novelist John Edgar Wideman has recently given up the game of playground basketball. His new memoir, Hoop Roots, originates in that loss, which is monumental, the terrifying and inevitable fate of every...
By Joe Flaherty The New York Times October 21, 1979 Of late, whenever one encounters an urbanbased novel, especially one set in Manhattan (or worse yet, in Greenwich Village), it’s odds on to be a claustrophobic affair; the activity is usually limited to treks to...
By Elizabeth Kaye The New York Times May 10, 1992 Ivan Zelnickova Trump never objected to personifying the salient maxim of the 1980’s, which was that everything worth anything could be bought. Her faith in this dainty precept was even more unwavering than that of the...
By Red Smith The New York Times June 11, 1973 The thing to remember is that the horse that finished last had broken the Kentucky Derby record. If there were no colt named Secretariat, then Sham would have gone into the Belmont Stakes Saturday honored as the finest...
By Hilton Kramer The New York Times 1964 Edward Hopper has long been a living classic of American art. This is not always the happiest fate for an American artist. Often it means only that a lucky formula was hit upon early in a career that was thereafter sustained by...