Sublime

His change in plans, the decision to stay, came one year after his arrival, in September 1847, when he was offered the chair of natural history at the Lawrence Scientific School, an institution newly established at Harvard partly for the purpose of keeping him in the United States.

I have not as yet mentioned a circumstance which influenced my whole career more than any other. This was my friendship with Professor Henslow. Before coming up to Cambridge, I had heard of him from my brother as a man who knew every branch of science, and I was accordingly prepared to reverence him. He kept open house once every week when all unde

Another event that cheered Max was his publishing a promising new writer named Morley Callaghan, a Canadian. Callaghan had met Hemingway when their careers at the Toronto Star overlapped; then he went to

I am teaching very hard, since I am so hopelessly square. My kids can write, unfortunately. Algren’s kids can probably write, too, but he is doing himself and them a favor by telling them to get out of town. Jane is out here for a week. She has to go back to nurse her mother, who has a busted hip. And I gave her a polaroid for her 43rd birthday, an

Herman Mankiewicz,

Jimmy Van Heusen was a decadent womanizer, an Olympian boozer, a war hero, a daredevil pilot, and one of America’s best songwriters. Bogart may have been Sinatra’s role model for style, but for lifestyle, it was Van Heusen “All the Way,” the Oscar-winning song Van Heusen wrote with his lyricist Sammy Cahn. Sinatra called Van Heusen “Chester,” after

It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness

In all the surviving accounts in which those who knew Louis Agassiz strive to describe and explain the hold he had on his time, the enthusiasm he generated, his charm and powers as expositor and leader, one theme remains constant: the quality of the man’s commitment. Silliman used the word engaged. William James told a story. James had been a membe