Scott McLemee

Once upon a time, American intellectual life featured a ritual known as the Partisan Review symposium. It was a solemn event, combining elements of high Mass and a boxing match. Here is how it worked: Every year or so, the tribal elders, gathering in the journal’s offices in New York, would prepare a list of […]

In 1954, James T. Farrell published a collection of essays called Reflections at Fifty. It is long since out of print, like most of his novels and, so far as I can tell, all of his nonfiction volumes. Digging it out now, Reflections is a reminder of what the author of Studs Lonigan was like […]