The White Problem
In Go Tell It on the Mountain, the young protagonist, John Grimes, stands on a hill in Central Park: “He felt like a long-awaited conqueror, at whose feet flowers… More
Maureen Howard: Leaps of Faith
Your letters had settled into friendship, and you wrote that you were learning to walk on crutches and felt like “a large stiff anthropoid ape who has no… More
Studs Terkel: The More Things Change
PEN American Center 4: Fact/FictionThis talk was presented, in slightly different form, at a PEN Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute.Dorothy Allison reminds me of a woman I know in Chicago named… More
A Suffering Conscience
A good writer helps to create other writers, and I can recall the first time, in the ’30s, when I read John Steinbeck’s early books, and his stories. To… More
Toward Total Recall
Was it in the summer? It probably was . . . when you thought you had enough time on your hands to fill them with a book, when an unappointed… More
Pure Magic
I want to tell you the three most important theatrical events of my life. There have been many—my first Sophocles, my first Shakespeare, my first Molière, my first Uncle… More
A Mighty Heart
In 1933 John Steinbeck was so poor he couldn't afford a dog. The literary critic Lewis Gannett uncovered this fact in Steinbeck’s correspondence with his agents during the time… More
The Play’s the Thing: A Discussion
BEGINNINGSCHARLES MEE: I had polio when I was a kid, and up until I was fifteen I had never read anything but comic books. Then a high school English… More
James Baldwin’s Grand Tour
In America I’m not really a private person. No, I’m a public person. And a public person cannot write. Writers always have to find a way to do their… More
Portable Cultures, Global Identities: Panel Discussion
I knew my friends were right: in school I had learned about my ancestors’ bravery, about how they fought the slave trade successfully. But I hated this history. I… More
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