Word: essayist
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Neither the author's older self nor anyone else has mounted a convincing challenge. Updike belongs to the minority that takes his serious poetry seriously. As for the rest, he has his peers, perhaps betters, as a novelist, belletrist, essayist and short-story writer, but they are different people in each case. Updike's versatility has been achieved at some cost. The rules governing his work have remained consistent and deliberately circumscribed. Wit dominates passion; irony mocks the possibility of tragic grandeur. The feelings most likely to seize Updike's comfortably situated people are nostalgia and lust...
DIED. Louis Lyons, 84, distinguished newspaper journalist, radio essayist, director of Harvard University's Nieman Foundation and vigilant watchdog of the American press; of cancer; in Cambridge, Mass. Lyons became a first-rank reporter and editorial writer at the Boston Globe, and in 1938 he earned a place in the first group of Nieman fellows, who are chosen to spend a year away from their beats studying subjects of their choice at Harvard. One year later the genteel, pipe-smoking Bostonian became the Nieman's curator, and during the next 25 years made the fellowships the most eminent...
Idioms and details, though are hardly enough of a foundation on which to construct a personal essay. Rather, as Hoagland points out in a short piece in the book specifically on the form of the essay, the critical ingredient is the quality of mind the essayist impresses on the work. Of course, this is no different from any form of literary expression Yet, the personal essay differs from the short story in the way it communicates its truth a difference which roughly mirrors that between plain speech and storytelling. Even the most inept can usually keep from bludgeoning beyond recognition...
DIED. Ayn Rand, 77, novelist and essayist, whose opinions inspired generations of conservatives, irritated liberals and entertained millions; in Manhattan. Born in Russia and educated at the University of Leningrad, she immigrated to the U.S. in 1926 and wrote the bestselling 1943 novel The Fountainhead, the story of an architect's uncompromising integrity. Yet her distinctive views were perhaps best summarized in the title of a 1965 work, The Virtue of Selfishness...
There are several E.B. Whites, almost all of them celebrated. The Essayist's style-fine gray flannel occasionally flecked with hayseed-charmed New Yorker readers for decades. The Escapist successfully migrated from Manhattan to Maine, and lived to write about it. The Storyteller grew famous by turning the travels of a tweedy, 2-in.-tall mouse into a memorable Wanderjahr for children, loaded with longing and nostalgia...