The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships
Silvers and Epstein, editors of The New York Review of Books, pull together 27 essays in this smart and eclectic collection. Published over the past four decades in the NYRB, pieces here deal with professional relationships and personal friendships among such writers as Robert Lowell and Jerome London, Susan Sontag and Paul Goodman, and Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. Saul Bellow writes of the immediate connection he made with John Cheever, whom he "met at irregular intervals all over the US." Derek Walcott shares his take on the work of fellow poet Robert Lowell, who "made the body of literature his body, all styles his style, every varying voice his own." And Larry McMurtry recalls his experiences with Ken Kesey, the original Merry Prankster, whom he first met at Stanford University in September 1960 and kept up with through the '70s, '80s and '90s. But readers unfamiliar with certain names in this anthology might find it all less than fascinating. Essays by relatively obscure writers such as Anna Akhmatova (on Amedeo Modigliani) and Michael Ignatieff (on Bruce Chatwin), for example, prove difficult to finish. A thoroughly academic audience, however, will no doubt appreciate the comprehensive line-up here.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.