Sublime

Malcolm Cowley assisted me in three important ways: His New Yorker profile of Perkins, “Unshaken Friend,” published in 1944, was the most comprehensive account of Perkins’s life to date.

Three days later, Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied commander, wrote of his own tour of a death camp. “The things I saw beggar description,” he said. “The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick….I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to