Tuesday November 29, 2022
The Task of an American Writer
“The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe 400 people under the lights reaching for a foul ball . . . [or] the faint thunder as 10,000 people, at the bottom of the eighth, head for the exits. The sense of moral judgments embodied in a migratory vastness.”
-- John Cheever, in his journals, as quoted in David Remnick's 1997 article “Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo's Undisclosed Underworld,” which The New Yorker recently re-promoted online. It's astonishing to me that “Underworld” came out as recently as 1997. The period in which it was published, a period when literature felt like it mattered, seems so old now, like it's part of a long-dead-and-buried culture.
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Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
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