Amiri Baraka: Our Man Jimmy
This excerpt is part of the Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to James Baldwin, sponsored by PEN American Center and Lincoln Center, with The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture… More
Postscript: Peter Matthiessen
On April 5, 2014, we learned that the American writer Peter Matthiessen, 86, had died in a hospital near his home in Sagaponack, New York. He had been suffering… More
‘That Book Wrote Me’
Chinua Achebe delivered the following speech at the close of PEN's 2008 Tribute to Chinua Achebe. It appears in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, along with other excerpts from the… More
Strangely Personal: Growing Up in Chinua Achebe’s House
The year that I turned six, my family moved into a bigger house with a staircase that at first terrified me. The family that had just moved out, I… More
Love Letter
“You’re a really good writer,” she said, “almost as good as your brother Charles. You should read the novel he’s writing.” So I snuck into Charles’s room and… More
Chinua Achebe, Storyteller In Excelsis
Nigerian PEN President Tade Ipadeola on the influence of Chinua Achebe on his life and African letters. More
Grand Tour
In America I’m not really a private person. No, I’m a public person. And a public person cannot write. More
Things Come Together, Things Fall Apart
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and… More
Sidney Offit: Memories of Norman Mailer
My memories of Norman Mailer drift back more than forty years to an evening we shared at one of the PEN cocktail parties. Held at the Pierre Hotel, these… More
Tribute to Norman Mailer
Unlike other literary figures, Mailer was not prone to elite sensibilities in his private or public life. He was not a pragmatist nor an opportunist, nor was he politically… More
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