Search results for: William Zinsser
Tales of ‘South Pacific’
Oscar Hammerstein II, lyricist and librettist of such high-minded musicals as Show Boat, South Pacific and The King and I, didn’t start his career on such an exalted plane. In 1925, at work on the musical Sunny, he learned that the producer had hired Cliff Edwards, better known as Ukulele Ike, to do …
Read MoreHome for Thanksgiving
I’ve been trying to imagine Norman Rockwell trying to paint the modern American family gathered around the Thanksgiving dinner table. For more than four decades Rockwell was the custodian of our domestic mythology, mainly with his cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post. Those covers fixed in our collective memory the sacramental moments of …
Read MoreOn the Trail of the Chêng Ho
Of all the travel books on my shelves, faithful reminders of places I once traveled far to see, one that often tugs at me is Garden Islands of the Great East: Collecting Seeds from the Philippines and Netherlands India in the Junk “Chêng Ho,” by David Fairchild. That’s a book I’m highly unlikely …
Read MoreTips
“We want you to come to our school and talk to our students about writing,” said the voice on the phone, introducing himself as the chairman of the school’s English department. I asked what he had in mind. “We’d like you to give our students some tips that will make them better …
Read MoreThe Revenge of the Comic Novel
… nations, and Booker winners tend not to be a lighthearted lot. Since the first award in 1969, they have included V. S. Naipaul, Iris Murdoch, Salman Rushdie, William Golding, J. M. Coetzee, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Ian McEwan, A. S. Byatt, Pat Barker, John Banville, and Anita Brookner, and their novels have left no acre of …
Read MoreCrash Through That Line of Blue!
The earliest songs I remember are football songs. Specifically, Princeton football songs, sung to me as a child by my father. My favorite, in its entirety, went:
Wow! Wow! Wow, wow, wow!
Hear the tiger roar!
Wow! Wow! Wow, wow, wow!
Rolling up the score!
Wow! Wow! Wow, wow, wow!
Better move along
When you …
An Interesting Life
Because of various academic ties our household receives a half-dozen alumni magazines, and I sometimes think I’ve been sent an architecture magazine by mistake. Proudly arrayed on their pages are photo layouts of construction sites–yellow cranes against the sky–and new buildings in strange shapes and materials. But where exactly are all …
Read MoreFantasia for the Left Hand
Corporal Richard Mohr came into my life in the fall of 1945. World War II was long over, but we were still stuck in the Army, waiting at a camp near Naples for a promised troopship to come one day and finally bring us all home. Time passed slowly. But Dick Mohr had many time …
Read MoreMen of Letters
… a serious literary socialite,” the Times said, citing a comment in Esquire that “everyone came to Vance’s parties.” Everyone typically included Norman Mailer, James Jones, and William Styron. Bourjaily was, in short, a “man of letters.”
How quaint that term sounds today. The republic of letters has largely sputtered out. Little bookstores where writers …
Out of Order
The underestimated humorist Henry David Thoreau says in Walden that “the cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.” The sentence is both wise and hilarious, giving us the pleasure of trying to picture that particular alignment of vehicle and animal.
Thoreau is musing on the compulsion of homeowners to decorate their homes with …