Sublime

“He’s going to die with his spurs on,” Gray said presciently in a 2017 interview. “He has no choice. He’s addicted.”

It was an example of two qualities that distinguish the professional editor: the vision to see beyond the faults of a good book, no matter how dismaying; and the tenacity to keep working, through all discouragements, toward the book’s potential.

Autobiography provides an alternate route—a seeming detour that may ultimately tell us something about an artist’s sensibility and the experiences that shaped it.

one of history’s most creative artists found himself decorating a clock for firewood, borrowing money for paint, and cadging wine.

Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight,

writing,

mistresses.28

James Jones, who was living in Illinois and inching ahead with From Here to Eternity.

longtime Clinton foe Jeff Gerth. He’s the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist