When Will Durant asked the wise about “the meaning of life,” he got the usual answers. Then he asked a prisoner.
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From a rooftop vision to a counterculture bible, Stewart Brand sowed the seeds of several revolutions.
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No verse was too light, no rhyme was too impossible for Ogden Nash.
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Shy and reclusive, he did not want to accept his Nobel in person. But he rose to the podium and lit a candle for humanity
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Reading science fiction, Octavia Butler saw no one like herself. So she vowed to “write myself in.”
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Turning his back to the continent, Robinson Jeffers offered an answer for our own troubled times.
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Born into a world of radios and Model T’s, he envisioned a fantastic future. And you can’t say he didn’t warn us.
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After reading with Ginsberg, teaching Zen to Kerouac, Gary Snyder followed his own path to become “the poet laureate of deep ecology.”
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Our National Pastime thrived on legend until Jim Bouton toppled the pedestals. Was that Mickey Mantle pinch hitting with a hangover?
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Dartmouth grads expected the usual boring commencement speaker. But Joseph Brodsky spoke about boredom itself, aka “your window on time.”
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Like Thought Woman of Laguna lore, Leslie Marmon Silko dreams whole worlds of reality and myth.
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He was a drunk squandering his talent. She was a poet who believed in him. Their love saved the “modern master” of the short story.
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A refrigerator note. A spark of genius. A classic poem and the senders it inspired.
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When The True Believer made his name, Eric Hoffer was a San Francisco longshoreman. Decades later, the zealots he labeled “true believers,” are still “everywhere on the march.”
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June 6, 1944 — Sgt. Salinger, with drafts of The Catcher in the Rye in his pack, lands at Normandy.
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"The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave." -- Rebecca Solnit
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