Debates about the precise contours of Herman Melville’s disgust with Emerson are far less illuminating — and entertaining — than Melville’s words themselves. (“I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was, the insinuation, that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.”) I love . . .
“You asked me to write a letter but I thought that I could not write well enough before this.” — Melville, to his aunt, at age 9. (Take a look at that handwriting.)
“I write the kinds of stories that boys tell when they are talking to only boys,” says Junot Diaz.
W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” is irresistible to Iraq war pundits. But what does it really mean?
This month Edinburgh reads Stevenson’s Kidnapped. (Donna Tartt has called the book a bridge “between the child’s world and the adult’s.)