Portis’s genius went beyond character in the strictly literary sense, to reveal something about moral character and many somethings about the character of this country. Read more
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His sagas of the Revolution and the Civil War sold tens of millions of copies, were adapted for TV and put him in the pantheon of big-name authors. Read more
He brought his own sometimes painful blue-collar experiences to bear in acclaimed stories exploring issues of race, class and power in American life. Read more
Gerald Stern’s generous, practical, and fanciful poems, which The New Yorker began publishing in 1976, are both rhapsodic and earthbound. Read more
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Gin, bourbon, valium, weed, horse racing, nine-ball, poker, pills, petroleum, chess, sex, television, losing, winning—the novels of Walter Tevis are queasy with addictions big and little. Most are hazardous. Some are deadly. A few seem nice enough, but nice is usually booby-trapped somehow, so that a character can’t enjoy, say, a game of pool without going on a bender a page later. These are novels without rising or falling action; they move to the jerkier rhythms of recovery and relapse. Read more
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Ned Buntline is the only American novelist who was lynched by an angry mob and lived to tell the tale, although he much preferred telling fictitious tales that made him seem heroic. Read more
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