That Rascal Paul de Kock
“A__ has been trying to inoculate me with Paul de Kock, who, she assures me, is a moral writer, and with whose books our tables, chairs, sofas, and beds, are covered, as with the unclean …
Neglected Authors
Writers whose lives and works have been ignored, overlooked, or completely forgotten by the mainstream of criticism and reference works.
The Tragedies of Isabel Bolton
Isabel Bolton floats through the letters and memoirs of other writers like a ghost. “Isabel Bolton was there,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote May Sarton about a cocktail party in 1954: “A strange and rather …
Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon, Lunatics of Genius
This is a guest post by David Quantick And so they sat and talked and drank and even sang a little. And the Puppa came beaming up with fresh supplies, and the Mumma sat at …
Morris Renek, the Single Most Dedicated Novelist
“Morris was the single most dedicated novelist I ever encountered,” Richard Elman wrote in his 1998 memoir Namedropping. “He would finish one novel and then start another. He was always at work for six and …
Eda Lord, Writing in the Margins
Mentions of Eda Lord are sprinkled in the margins of dozens of biographies of 20th Century writers. She was food writer M. F. K. Fisher’s schoolmate and first love at the Bishop’s School in La …
Benjamin De Casseres, Individualist
This is a guest article written by the critic and artist Richard Kostelanetz, based on a piece that originally appeared in Rain Taxi #88. His website is at richardkostelanetz.com Ever since New Association of Sephardi/Mizrahi …
English as a Second Language: Following in Conrad’s Footsteps
Reviews of Selina Hasting’s new biography of Sybille Bedford, who was born Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, Germany and forced to live as an exile starting in the late 1930s due to her …
Peter Greave’s Secrets
I first came across Peter Greave in a battered Penguin paperback copy of his 1977 memoir, The Seventh Gate, that I’d found at the Montana Valley Book Store, a marvelous storehouse of books in the …
What to Make of Rod McKuen?
I wonder how many people under the age of 40 understand the point of this question. If you’re under 40, by the time you learned to read, Rod McKuen had already begun to fade from …
Who was Tom Kromer? On the author of Waiting for Nothing
A few days ago, the Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath released their first reissue title, bringing the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, back to print for the first time …
Andrew Graham, Teller of Club Secrets
I came across Andrew Graham — Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Graham, to give him his proper title — through his story collection Mostly Nasty (1961). I bought the book purely for its intriguing cover and lovely …
Alice Koller, author of An Unknown Woman Dies at Age 94
Most of the people I write about are no longer with us. And when I began my research for the post about Alice Koller’s An Unknown Woman five years ago, I assumed she was, too. …
John Timbs, Scissors-and-Paste Man
If I live to be 100, I vow to spend at least one of my remaining years compiling a “Best Of” compilation from the God-knows-how-many compilations assembled by John Timbs, perhaps the greatest of all …
Herbert Clyde Lewis and the Rescue of Gentleman Overboard: A Work in Progress
“Listen to me! Somebody please listen!” cries Henry Preston Standish, the hero of Herbert Clyde Lewis’s 1937 novel, Gentleman Overboard, as he struggles to stay afloat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, exhausted and …
“On the Floor” and the Mystery of Joan Jukes
“But when I open the door I find someone has moved my chair.” Some hold that a proper short story should start midstream. Joan Jukes’ 1935 story, “On the Floor,” takes this advice to the …
Inez Holden: A Memoir, by Anthony Powell
From London Magazine, Oct/Nov 1974, Vol. 14 No. 4, a remembrance of Inez Holden, author of There’s No Story There, reviewed here in August: Inez Holden died on 30 May this year. She had been …
Eleanor Saltzman, Novelist and Poet
In and among all the dispiriting and infuriating news we’ve been exposed to lately, several efforts to recognize the work of some women writers have provided some refreshing and inspiring relief. Last week, the Paris …
W. R. Rodgers, Poet
“In Ireland why a man becomes a poet is a question not to be asked,” writes Darcy O’Brien in W. R. Rodgers (1970), his fine memoir of the poet from the Bucknell University Press Irish …
Kenneth Fearing, Poet
If poetry didn’t have a bad rap in the eyes of American readers and publishers, the poems of Kenneth Fearing would never go out of print. They’d be shelved alongside the crime novels of Dashiell …
Anna Wickham: Poetess and Landlady
In the April 27, 1946 edition of Picture Post, a U. K. version of Life, an unusual three-page story was devoted to a poet who, even then, was two decades past her brief and limited …