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....
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 Ron Rosenbaum The New York Observer June 27, 2013 I’m standing outside an imposing four-story graystone townhouse. Located on a leafy, blossoming block of East 94th Street in Manhattan, it’s the headquarters and worship center of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda...
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 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...
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic 2016 Back in 1998, magazine writer Mike Sager was best known for his fearless profiles of drug dealers, crackheads, porn stars, and neo-Nazis. But that year Esquire handed him a very different kind of assignment: Write about an old man....
By John Lardner True May 1954 Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast. That was in 1910. Up to 1907 the world at large had never heard of Ketchel. In the three...
By Scott Raab GQ July 1995 Lost inside a huge sweater and a baggy, low-slung pair of jeans, an oversized brown fedora slumped well down on his forehead, half walking, half leaning against a young woman with long brown hair, actor/boxer Mickey Rourke trudges down a...
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...
By John H. Richardson Premiere December 1997 “I’m getting bored here,” Cameron is saying. “I went for popcorn 10 minutes ago.” He is speaking into a handheld cordless microphone, his voice booming down from the astonishingly crisp overhead speakers like the voice of...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Around these parts, we are enormous Eve Babitz fans. Would we belong to a fan club? You bet we would. Proudly. If you don’t know from Babitz, not only is she a wonderful writer but she’s lived some kind of life, all of which is detailed...
