TBR

The recent Salman Rushdie sighting led me to this BBC take, and The Chronicle of Higher Education's article on the New York Intellectuals sent me googling all the way back to Irving Howe in 1969.

more from the Atlas

I had been twenty-four when I embarked on Delmore; I was forty when I began Bellow. The young biographer had been thrilled to interview the distinguished Partisan Review intellectuals Irving Howe and Clement Greenberg. But on my second tour. . . I felt a little sheepish. Not him again, they must have thought. The slight, eager youth with his oblong reporter's notebook had metamorphosed into a weary middle-aged writer. Not them again.