These 50 Literary Anecdotes from the Greatest Living Essayist Will Have You Smirking in Your Overstuffed Chair While Enjoying a Good Pipe
Joseph Epstein is the greatest living essayist.
He served in the army, attended the University of Illinois, graduated from the University of Chicago, worked as an English instructor at Northwestern University, and was the editor of the magazine The American Scholar from 1975 to 1997, for which he wrote lead essays that were later collected to form his first books.
He has also proven fearless, writing whatever he thinks is correct, even if it inflames. Even though he always does so with elegance, he also does so with a bite of wit. The result: the humorless and inelegant hate him.
Me? I’ve never taken offense. He’s too chock full of detached goodwill to merit hate, so I’ve been delighting in his prose for 30 years.
When you read Epstein, you stumble upon anecdotes frequently, like a bum, in quick succession during his morning ambulation, stumbling across an unopened bottle of Ripple, a small pile of loose change, and a dented but unopened box of Nature Valley Peanut Butter Granola Bars.
At this stage, I’ve read only a fraction of his biographical work. Therefore, the 50 literary anecdotes assembled here are…
