ROBERT BOYERS, born in 1942, founded the American
quarterly magazine Salmagundi in 1965 and continues to edit the
journal, to teach at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York
and to direct the New York State Summer Writers Institute. As a
graduate student at New York University in 1965 he first got to
know George Steiner, and a year later began correspondence with
Susan Sontag, these initial contacts leading to intense, sometimes
difficult friendships that persisted over decades. Boyers is the
author of hundreds of periodical essays and of a dozen books, most
recently a widely discussed book on the "culture wars" entitled The
Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy & The Hunt for Political
Heresies. His other books include two works on politics and the
novel, a volume of short stories and a 2015 book on The Fate of
Ideas. In 2009 he edited and wrote the introduction for George
Steiner at The New Yorker, a book that has been published in more
than twenty languages.
Short Biographies of the Subjects of This Memoir:
SUSAN SONTAG, born in 1933, was the best-known public
intellectual in the United States for about forty years, roughly
from the appearance of her famous essay Notes on Camp in 1965 until
the time of her death in 2004.Though she made feature films and
wrote a good deal of fiction--she won the National Book Award for
her novel In America in 2002--she was principally read and admired
as an essayist, critic and polemicist. She was also widely admired
as a human rights activist who wrote about her experiences in war
zones in Sarajevo, the Middle East and Vietnam. Her many books
include Illness as Metaphor, On Photography, Against
Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, Under the Sign of Saturn
and At the Same Time. A biography of Sontag by Benjamin Moser won
the Pulitzer Prize in 2020.
GEORGE STEINER, born in 1929, was a European intellectual
and man of letters who attracted an enormous following in the
United States, initially based upon the publication of early books
like The Death of Tragedy, Tolstoy or Dostoyevski and Language &
Silence. But his influence also had much to do with his role as a
regular book critic for The New Yorker Magazine and with the
periodical writing he did for the leading newspapers and magazines.
Many readers regarded him as the most learned thinker of his
generation, and also as the most thrilling lecturer they had ever
seen, His major books include After Babel,Antigones,
Extraterritorial, Real Presences and a controversial "Holocaust
novel" entitled The Portage to San Cristobal of AH. He died in
2020.
A delicious portrait of two difficult, brilliant intellectuals, and
a spirited vindication of criticism as a noble calling.--Garth
Greenwell
This superb book takes us back to the last moments of the golden
age of American letters.
--Cornel West
Robert Boyers has been in close contact with
every seismic shift in literary, intellectual, artistic,
and academic quarters.--Joyce Carol Oates
A moving contribution to the history of our intellectual
culture.--Darryl Pinckney
A thrillingly generous book ... in the grand tradition of Samuel
Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," Sainte-Beuve's biographical
sketches, and Turgenev's "Literary Reminiscences."--Philip
Lopate
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