Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

I have read all of Daniel Aaron's books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.

Shakespeare is universal.

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.