A Commonplace Blog

My seven-year-old son Isaac was listening to Gil Roth’s interview with me on the Virtual Memories Show . “He will be dead from prostate can...

In English-language prose fiction, that is. Here without much further ado or explanation is the list of the twenty-five greatest literary de...

You might say that my bibliography of ’sixties fiction has been a lifetime in the making. The first hardback book that I ever bought with m...

Among the distempers of learning in our day is the habit of reading canonical fiction as if it were the only fiction in existence. In the re...

A season into my sixth year of living with Stage IV metastatic prostate cancer, I am finally writing a book on the experience. Or, rather, w...

Will Wilkinson laments the decline of “old school blogging,” the original style of blogging—before the media outlets launched their group b...

A few days ago, the economist Thomas Sowell found himself obligated to write an op-ed column in which he pointed out that “trickle-down eco...

Tomorrow I will step into a classroom to begin the last semester of a 24-year teaching career. Don’t get me wrong. I am not retiring. I am n...

Victor Brombert, Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 188 pages. Victor Bromber...

Sunday was the fifth anniversary of this Commonplace Blog . My very first post, appropriately enough given my sworn allegiance to him, was a...

Yesterday the Powerline blog—a politically conservative blog out of the Twin Cities—linked to my essay on Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather...

The reshaping of American literary culture from the early 1950’s to the early 1970’s might be captured in one historical image. James Jones’...

Alice Munro became the first writer whose reputation derives almost exclusively from short stories—and the first Canadian—to win the Nobel P...

“He most honors my style,” Whitman wrote in Song of Myself , “who learns under it to destroy the teacher.” The best thing about teaching is ...

Anyone who has ever read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , which used to be pretty much every boy in America, remembers the scene in which Tom,...

Baz Luhrmann substitutes a high-school English paper for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel in scripting his film version of The Great Gatsby , re...

The discussion of The Great Gatsby begins today in my course on it—an entire course devoted to a 180-page book—and in rereading it, I was s...