Many of the illustrious contributors to The New York Review of Books have had deep and abiding relationships-both personal and intellectual-with other poets, writers, artists, composers, and scientists of equal stature. The Company They Kept is a collection of twenty-seven accounts of these varied friendships-most of them undeniably fraught with "idiosyncratic complexities." One of the sweetest and funniest is Prudence Crowther's memoir of her romance, at age thirty, with the seventy-four-year-old S. J. Perelman ("As a friend of mine put it, 'Yeah, too bad you couldn't have met when you were twenty-six and he was seventy -or when he was thirty, and your parents hadn't met yet'"). Darryl Pinckney recalls his unsettling stint as Djuna Barnes's handyman. Susan Sontag's piece on Paul Goodman is more about how they never hit it off; Seamus Heaney's remembrance of Tom Flanagan has all the melancholy affection of a bereft and beloved son.Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey were graduate students together-for years afterward, McMurtry recalls, the Merry Pranksters would show up unannounced, and throw his family and neighbors into hilarious chaos. Derek Walcott recalls his parting of the ways with Robert Lowell, and of their bittersweet reconciliation. And Robert Oppenheimer writes that he wants to dispel the clouds of myth surrounding Albert Einstein: "As always, the myth has its charms; but the truth is far more beautiful." From Anna Akhmatova's dreamlike description of wandering through Paris with the impoverished Modigliani to Joseph Brodsky's account of his first meeting with Isaiah Berlin (from which he returned to report, around the kitchen table, to Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden), these pieces are tantalizing glimpses into the lives of those who have made The New York Review of Books into what Esquire magazine calls "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language." The many contributors include: Stanley Kunitz on Theodore Roethke Robert Lowell on Randall Jarrell Susan Sontag on Paul Goodman Jason Epstein on Edmund Wilson Saul Bellow on John Cheever Robert Craft on Igor Stravinsky Darryl Pinckney on Djuna Barnes Derek Walcott on Robert Lowell Enrique Krauze on Octavio Paz Elizabeth Hardwick on Mary McCarthy Larry McMurtry on Ken Kesey Seamus Heaney on Thomas Flanagan Robert Oppenheimer on Albert Einstein Maurice Grosser on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

In the fall of 1959, Harper's Magazine published a special supplement on the state of writing and the American literary scene. The supplement was greeted with a broadside of commendation and a fusillade of cavil, and has since become recognized as the most useful brief survey of the contemporary state of the American writing arts and of their fellow travelers, the spoken word, the typescript word, the filmed and televised word, and the publishing memorandum. In this newly reissued volume in the Rutgers University Press Classics Imprint, Writing in America proves to be as stimulating as it was in 1960. Here, writers including Robert Brustein, Stanley Kunitz, and C.P. Snow examine the state of writing in American novels, films, and television candidly and critically. The result is a collection of essays that showcase a first-rate and highly entertaining piece of reporting on the American literary scene that resonate in 2017.

In the fall of 1959, Harper's Magazine published a special supplement on the state of writing and the American literary scene. The supplement was greeted with a broadside of commendation and a fusillade of cavil, and has since become recognized as the most useful brief survey of the contemporary state of the American writing arts and of their fellow travelers, the spoken word, the typescript word, the filmed and televised word, and the publishing memorandum. In this newly reissued volume in the Rutgers University Press Classics Imprint, Writing in America proves to be as stimulating as it was in 1960. Here, writers including Robert Brustein, Stanley Kunitz, and C.P. Snow examine the state of writing in American novels, films, and television candidly and critically. The result is a collection of essays that showcase a first-rate and highly entertaining piece of reporting on the American literary scene that resonate in 2017.