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Abrams, M. H., 173
Academic Instincts (Garber), 130
“Academic Zoo, The” (Epstein), 224
Actors Anonymous (Franco), 426
Adam Bede (Eliot), 89
Adams, Henry, xxvii
Adler, H. G., 120
Adventures of Augie March, The (Bellow), 109, 120, 214
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain), xxv–xxvi, 282, 335
Aeneid, The (Virgil), 155
Aeschylus, 103–4, 107, 239, 424
“Against Independent Voters” (Fish), 135
Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Bloom), 176
Aiken, Conrad, 161
Airships (Hannah), 390–91, 393
Albee, Edward, 302
Alchemist, The (Coelho), 157
Alger, Horatio, 212, 216
Allen, Woody, 189
All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy), 428
“All You Need Is Hate” (Fish), 135
Almond, Steve, 56–58
Already Dead (Johnson), 415
Ambition (Epstein), 204
American Renaissance (Matthiessen), xxiv–xxv, xxx
Amis, Kingsley, 57, 101, 187
Amis, Martin, 73, 120, 185, 188, 190, 436, 442
“Amis Papers, The” (Wolcott), 190
Ammons, A. R., 182
Anatomy of Influence, The (Bloom), 170–84, 181, 183
Anderson, Sherwood, xxv
“Annabel Lee” (Poe), 323, 325
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 165
Antin, Mary, xxix–xxx
Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom), 175–76, 177, 379, 420–21
Aquinas, Thomas, 22, 296
Archer, Jodie, 73–82
Arendt, Hannah, 120
“Areopagitica” (Milton), 33–34
Aristophanes, 239
Aristotle, 188
Armed Vision, The (Hyman), 160–61
Arnold, Matthew, xxxii, 6–8, 118, 152–53, 160, 163–65, 171–72, 179, 193, 204, 363
Art & Ardor (Ozick), 123
Arthur Gordon Pym (Poe), 335
“Artificial Nigger, The” (O’Connor), 277, 372
“Artist’s Struggle for Integrity, The” (Baldwin), 302
Arvin, Newton, xxvii, 313–14
Ashbery, John, 85, 182
“Assignation, The” (Poe), 331–32
“Aubade” (Larkin), 441
Auden, W. H., 97, 119, 197, 293, 324, 394
Augustine, 22–23, 97–98, 172, 296
Austen, Jane, 63, 67–70, 75
Autobiography (Cellini), 95–96
Autobiography (Franklin), xix
Baeck, Leo, 120
Bailey, Blake, 247–49
Baker, Nicholson, 89
Baldwin, James, xiv–xv, xvii, xxiii, xxvi–xxix, xxxii, 214, 278–79, 292–307, 352, 391, 408
Balzac, Honoré de, 142
Barry Hannah: Postmodern Romantic (Weston), 393–94
Barthelme, Donald, 197, 380
Barzun, Jacques, 161, 226
Bass, Rick, 393
Bats Out of Hell (Hannah), 392–93, 394, 396
Baudelaire, Charles, 300
Beckett, Samuel, 151, 158, 377–86, 418
Beerbohm, Max, 201
Behn, Aphra, 179
“Being Reviewed” (Fussell), 198–200
Bell, Daniel, 214
Bellow, Saul, xxiii, 16, 24–5, 51, 108–9, 114, 119, 120, 123, 154, 214, 301, 411–12
Benjamin, Walter, 39–40
Bentham, Jeremy, 227
“Berenice” (Poe), 325
Berlin, Isaiah, 295
Bernard, Emily, 342–43, 348
Berryman, John, 99
Bestseller Code, The (Archer and Jockers), 73–82
Between Them (Ford), 438–42
Bible, xx, 170, 179–80, 206, 297, 305, 317, 319, 358, 399, 409, 423
“Big Two-Hearted River” (Hemingway), 414
Birkerts, Sven, 41
“Black Cat, The” (Poe), 326, 327, 329
Blackmur, R. P., xii, 161, 223, 354
Blake, William, 29, 126
Blake’s Apocalypse (Bloom), 173
Blind Bow-Boy, The (Van Vechten), 349
Blood Meridian (McCarthy), 357, 396, 421, 422, 431, 432
Bloom, Harold, xii, 52, 119–20, 125–26, 152, 166–84, 203, 213, 278, 280, 284, 290, 297, 306, 328, 379, 420–21
Blue Angel (Prose), 433
Blythe, Will, 390
Bodies in Motion and at Rest (Lynch), 99
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 365
“Book Collecting” (Davies), 33
Book of J, The (Bloom), 179
“Books for the Journey” (Huxley), 43
Boomerang (Hannah), 394
Borges, Jorge Luis, 40
Boswell, James, 36
Bradford, William, xviii, xx, xxv
Bradley, A. C., 21
Bradstreet, Anne, xviii
Breaking Ranks (Podhoretz), 216
“Bridle, The” (Carver), 417
Brighton Rock (Greene), 27
Brodsky, Joseph, 293
Brooks, Cleanth, 118
Brooks, Van Wyck, 335
Brown, Dan, 75, 77, 79
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 366–67
Broyard, Anatole, 40
Bruno, Giordano, 57
Brunton, Mary, 63, 67–70
Buckley, William F., 54, 215
Bukowski, Charles, 411
Burgess, Anthony, 38, 44, 75
Burke, Kenneth, xiv
Burroughs, Augusten, 98
Burroughs, William, 411, 418
Byron, Lord, 63, 173, 407
Cain, James M, 304, 355
Caldwell, Erskine, 304
Calhoun, Frances Boyd, 277
Call of the Wild, The (London), 424
Calvin, John, xvi–xvii
Campbell, Joseph, 106
Camus, Albert, 399
Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription (Buckley), 54
Candide (Voltaire), 7
Canetti, Elias, 223
Capote, Truman, 61, 62–63, 120, 278–79, 343, 351
Captain Maximus (Hannah), 390
“Car Crash While Hitchhiking” (Johnson), 413–14
Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance (Bernard), 342–43
Carlyle, Thomas, 106
“Carriba” (Hannah), 394
Carver, Raymond, xxv, 412–13, 417–18
Catch-22 (Heller), xxv
“Cathedral” (Carver), 418
Cather, Willa, xxiii, 201
“Catholic Novelists and Their Readers” (O’Connor), 26
Catullus, 89
Cellini, Benvenuto, 95–96
Certain World, A (Auden), 97
Cervantes, Miguel de, 15, 167–68, 178, 180, 423
Chandler, Raymond, xxv
Chase, Richard, 214
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 65, 168, 181, 423
Cheever: A Life (Bailey), 247–49
Cheever, John, 239, 247–50
Chekhov, Anton, 153, 242, 246, 254
Chesterton, G. K., 23
“Childe Roland” (Browning), 366–67
Child of God (McCarthy), 396, 421, 427–28
“Christ in the Room” (Hannah), 397
“Christmas Thought, A” (Hannah), 396
“Church and the Fiction Writer, The” (O’Connor), 26
Cicero, 63, 64
Clancy, Tom, 78, 84
Clare, John, 57
Clarissa (Richardson), 89, 260
Coelho, Paulo, 157
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 104–5, 160
Collins, Jackie, 75
“Colloquy of Monos and Una” (Poe), 330
Coming Up for Air (Orwell), 36
Confessions (Augustine), 97–98, 172
Confessions (Rousseau), 36, 97–98
Confessions of a Secular Jew (Goodheart), 33
Connolly, Cyril, 196
Conrad, Joseph, 167–68, 196, 245, 423
“Conversion of the Jews, The” (Roth), 17
Cool World, The (Miller), 300
Cooper, James Fenimore, xxv
Cornwall, Barry, 63
Cowley, Malcolm, 351
Crabbe, George, 63
Crane, Hart, 173, 175, 182, 426
Crane, Stephen, xvii, xxiii
“Creative Process, The” (Baldwin), 299–300
Crews, Frederick, 130
Crews, Harry, 396
Critical Mass (Wolcott), 186–91
“Critic as Artist, The” (Wilde), 92
Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (Ozick), 118–24
Critics Bear It Away, The (Crews), 130
“Critic’s Credentials, The” (Hyman), 160–61
Crossing, The (McCarthy), 52
“Cult of Experience in American Writing, The” (Rahv), 96–99
Culture and Anarchy (Arnold), 6–8
Culture Crash (Timberg), 3–14
Culture of Narcissism, The (Lasch), 100–101, 212, 217–18
Dante, 15, 176, 384, 423, 431
Darwin, Charles, 136
David Copperfield (Dickens), 370
Davidson, Donald, 371
Davies, Robertson, 33, 44
Da Vinci Code, The (Brown), 75
Dawkins, Richard, 53, 136
Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers, 49–50
Death in Venice (Mann), 259, 423
“Decay of Lying, The” (Wilde), 93, 400–401
Declaration of Independence, The (Jefferson), 110–12, 233
“Decoy” (Gurganus), 241–44, 251–53, 259, 261–62
Defense of Poetry, A (Shelley), 224
Delbanco, Andrew, 313
de Man, Paul, 149, 174, 222–24, 226, 227
Denby, David, 148–59, 228–29
Derrida, Jacques, 149, 222–24, 226, 227
de Sade, Marquis, 89, 155
Devil Finds Work, The (Baldwin), 293–301, 305–6
Devil Knows How to Ride, The (Leslie), 395
Devil Wears Prada, The (Weisberger), 80
De Vries, Peter, 103, 110
Dewey, John, 407
Diary of H. L. Mencken, The (Mencken), 201
Dickens, Charles, 49, 246
Dickinson, Emily, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 61, 141, 163, 167, 321
“Dirty Wedding” (Johnson), 416
Discipline (Brunton), 67
“Discovery of What It Means to Be an American, The” (Baldwin), xv
Divorced in America (Epstein), 205
Doctor Faustus (Mann), 259
Donaldson, Willie, 92
Don Juan (Byron), 407
Donne, John, 129, 296, 305–6, 363, 365, 368, 387
Donoghue, Denis, 180
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 151, 156, 168, 399
Dreiser, Theodore, xxvi, 336, 344
Dryden, John, 63, 226
Du Bois, W. E. B., 346
Du Bos, Charles, 15
“Dundun” (Johnson), 418
Dupee, F. W., 214
Durkheim, Émile, 416
E. M. Forster (Trilling), 163
Eagleton, Terry, 132, 136–37
“East River, Downtown” (Baldwin), 352
Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert), 98
“Echo of Neighborly Bones, The” (Woodrell), 361
Economy of Character (Lynch), 221
Edisto (Powell), 380
Edisto Revisited (Powell), 381
Educated Imagination, The (Frye), 97, 156
Edwards, Jonathan, xix
“Eleanora” (Poe), 331
Eliot, George, 89, 120, 246, 314, 411
Eliot, T. S., xii, xvii, xxvii, xxix, 96–97, 121–22, 141, 145, 161, 173–74, 201, 319–20, 325, 368, 385
Elkin, Stanley, 247
Ellis, Brett Easton, 61, 418
Ellison, Ralph, xvii, xxiii–xxiv, xxvii, xxix–xxx, 278–79
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xx, xxiii–xxv, 172, 175, 325, 407
Empson, William, 140, 145
Endgame (Beckett), 385
End of the Affair, The (Greene), 26–29
“Eng. Lit. As She Is Taught” (Fadiman), 154
Envy (Epstein), 205
Epstein, Joseph, 127, 180, 192–205, 209
Erskine, John, 164
Essays in Biography (Epstein), 197–98
Essence of Christianity, The (Feuerbach), 366
Esslin, Martin, 377–79
Eumenides, The (Aeschylus), 107
Euripides, 260
Every Riven Thing (Wiman), 364–66
“Except Thou rise and for Thine own work fight” (Donne), 305–6
Exile’s Return (Cowley), 351
Experience (Amis), 188, 442
Fadiman, Clifton, 154–55, 156–57
“Fall of the House of Usher, The” (Poe), 327–28
Familiar Territory (Epstein), 196–97
Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway), 61–62
Father and Son (Gosse), 48
Faulkner, William, xxiii, xxvi, 62, 151, 239, 241–42, 344, 355, 357, 371, 426, 430
“Favoritism Is Good” (Fish), 135
“Fear Not” (Gurganus), 240, 246–47, 259, 262
Feiffer, Jules, 189
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 366
“Fever” (Carver), 418
Fiedler, Leslie, 214, 332, 333, 335, 336
“Fifth Avenue, Uptown” (Baldwin), 352
Fifty Shades of Grey (James), 66, 83–90
Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 182
Fire in the Morning (Spencer), 371
Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin), 297, 298–99
“First Dark” (Spencer), 376
Fish, Stanley, 125–39, 197
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, xix, 204, 241, 343, 344, 349
Flaubert, Gustave, 260
“Footnote on Criticism” (Mencken), 201–2
Ford, Richard, 186–87, 388, 438–42
Forster, E. M., 41, 47, 69, 119
Foucault, Michel, 149
Four Essays on Liberty (Berlin), 295
France, Anatole, 39
Franco, James, 426–32
Franklin, Benjamin, xix, 110
Freud, Sigmund, 52, 140–47, 189, 326, 439
Frey, James, 91–95, 99–100, 406
Friendship (Epstein), 205
Frisch, Max, 42
From the Earth to the Moon (Verne), 324
Frost, Robert, xxv, 368
Frye, Northrop, 97, 117–18, 156, 173, 179, 317
“Function of Criticism at the Present Time, The” (Arnold), 118, 171–72
Fussell, Paul, 77, 198–200
Galapagos (Vonnegut), 357
Garber, Marjorie, 130
García Márquez, Gabriel, 242
Gass, William, 120
Gay, William, 396
“Generous Gambler, The” (Baudelaire), 300
“Genesis” (Hill), 367
Genius (Bloom), 171, 179
Geronimo Rex (Hannah), 393
Getting Married (Shaw), 370–71
Gibbon, Edward, 31–32, 43–44
Gilbert, Elizabeth, 98
Ginsberg, Allen, 162, 213, 426
Gissing, George, 31–32, 39, 44
Give Us a Kiss (Woodrell), 360
Glazer, Nathan, 214
Glück, Louise, 167
“God Talk” (Fish), 137
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xv, 37–38, 61, 78, 204
Goodheart, Eugene, 33
Goodman, Paul, 214
“Good Man Is Hard to Find, A” (O’Connor), 26, 277, 424
Gorky, Maxim, 303
Go Set a Watchman (Lee), 267–73, 285–91
Gosse, Edmund, 48
Gossip (Epstein), 205
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin), 296
Gratitude (Sacks), 147
Great Books (Denby), 149, 158, 228–29
Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), xix, 343
Greeley, Horace, 309
Greenberg, Clement, 214
Greene, Graham, 23, 26–29, 283
Grisham, John, 80
“Guns and Poses” (Wolcott), 186
Gurganus, Allan, 233–66, 436
“H. L. Mencken for Grownups” (Epstein), 203
Hall, Donald, xii
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 80, 181–82, 255, 295
Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (Bloom), 174–75, 181–82
Handful of Dust, A (Waugh), 36
Hannah, Barry, 380, 387–99
“Hans Phaall” (Poe), 324
Happy Life, The (Malouf), 111–13
Hard-Core Romance (Illouz), 84–90
Hardwick, Elizabeth, xv–xvi, xxii, 6, 88, 188, 214, 315
Harris, Sam, 136
Harry Potter series (Rowling), 84
Hartman, Geoffrey, 173–74, 178
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, xxii, xxiv–xxv, xxvii–xxix, 16, 151, 156, 315–16, 318, 334
Hazlitt, William, 50–51, 58–59, 76, 122, 167, 171, 196, 227, 299
Hazzard, Shirley, 79
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 423
Heart of the Matter, The (Greene), 27, 28
Heller, Joseph, xxv
Hellman, Lillian, 215
Hemingway, Ernest, xxiii, xxv–xxvi, 61–62, 69, 93, 286, 355, 357, 412, 414
Herbert, George, 128, 363, 365, 385, 407
“Heresy of the Didactic” (Poe), 332
Herman Melville (Arvin), 313–14
Herzen, Alexander, 167
Herzog (Bellow), 109, 114
Hey Jack! (Hannah), 388
Hicks, Granville, 278
High Lonesome (Hannah), 392, 394
Hill, Geoffrey, xi–xiii, 364, 365, 367
Himes, Chester, 304, 344
History of Japan to 1334 (Sansom), 39
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Gibbon), 31–32, 43–44
Hitchens, Christopher, 136, 147, 188, 211, 213
Hobbes, Thomas, 406
Hoffman, Eva, 99
Hold the Dark (Giraldi), 421–24
“Holiness of the Ordinary, The” (Percy), 30
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 38–39
Holy Sonnets (Donne), 305–6, 365
Homer, xxi, 12, 106, 155, 168, 226, 395, 422, 423, 424
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, xi–xiii, 23, 167, 296, 359, 363, 365, 367, 368, 387–88
Horace, 7, 63–65, 70, 226
House of the Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne), xxiv–xxv
Housman, A. E., 225–26
Howe, Irving, 117, 122, 188, 214
Howells, William Dean, xxvi
How Milton Works (Fish), 127
“How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic” (Percy), 15, 18–19
How to Read and Why (Bloom), 173, 183
How to Write a Sentence (Fish), 138
Hughes, Langston, 306, 341, 351
Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow), 109
Hume, David, 23
Hunt, Leigh, 32, 34, 38
Hurston, Zora Neale, 341
Huxley, Aldous, 43, 47, 119, 151, 227
Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 160–61
“Idaho” (Hannah), 390, 394
Iliad, The (Homer), 155
Illouz, Eva, 84–90
Importance of Being Earnest, The (Wilde), 406–7
“Inside the Whale” (Orwell), 24
Interrogative Mood, The (Powell), 380–81
In the American Grain (Williams), xvii, 334
Irving, John, 247, 262
Irving, Washington, xxv, 335
Is There a Text in This Class? (Fish), 128, 131
It All Adds Up (Bellow), 109
Ivanhoe (Scott), 70
Jackson, H. L., 63–72
James, Clive, 147, 223
James, E. L. (Erika Mitchell), 66, 80, 83–90
James, Henry, xv, xxvi, xxxi, 24, 69, 76–77, 120, 163, 167–68, 196, 197, 201, 297, 325, 411
James, William, 109, 210, 407
Jarrell, Randall, 161, 224
Jefferson, Thomas, 110–12
Jenkins, Jerry B., 16
Jesus’ Son (Johnson), 410–19
Jockers, Matthew, 73–82
Johnson, Denis, 355, 356, 410–19
Johnson, James Weldon, 350–51
Johnson, Samuel, xii, 63, 65–67, 70–71, 77, 142, 167, 169, 171, 172–73, 175, 227
Jolivette, Vince, 428
Jones, Edward P., 301
Jones, Thom, 396
“Jordan (I)” (Herbert), 407
Journals (Cheever), 248–49
Journals (Emerson), xx, 407
Journals (Kazin), 213
Joyce, James, 24, 181–82
Julie (Rousseau), 142
Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 211
Jungle, The (Sinclair), xxix–xxx
Junky (Burroughs), 418
Kabbalah and Criticism (Bloom), 176
Kael, Pauline, 186
Kafka, Franz, 119, 152, 157–58, 255–56, 329, 399, 415
Kaufmann, Walter, 227, 369
Kavanagh, Patrick, 365, 367
Kazin, Alfred, 163, 176, 208, 213, 216, 349–50
Keats, John, 63, 70, 173, 176–77, 227, 338, 407
Keenan, Randall, 259
Kellner, Mabel Bruce, 343
Kennedy, William, 355
Kermode, Frank, 168, 179, 182
Kerouac, Jack, 411
Kierkegaard, Søren, 12, 17–18, 401
King, Stephen, 81
King Lear (Shakespeare), 255
Kingsblood Royal (Lewis), 304
Kipling, Rudyard, 371
Kirsch, Adam, 161–64
Kolmar, Gertrud, 120
Kristol, Irving, 214
Kushner, Tony, 146
LaHaye, Tim, 16
Lamb, Charles, 273
Landscapes of the Heart (Spencer), 371, 372
Lardner, Ring, xxv
Larkin, Philip, 187, 441
La Rochefoucauld, François de, 143, 195
Lasch, Christopher, 100–101, 212, 217–18
Last Decade, The (Trilling), 164
Last Gentleman, The (Percy), 18
“Last Good Country, The” (Hemingway), 414
“Last Invocation, The” (Whitman), 147
Last Puritan, The (Santayana), 408
Latest Readings (James), 147
Lawrence, D. H., xix, xxii–xxiii, 46–48, 50, 55–56, 119, 327, 332, 346–48, 354, 368
Leaves of Grass (Whitman), xxiv–xxv
Leavis, F. R., 121, 214, 226
Lectures on Russian Literature (Nabokov), 166
Lee, Harper, 267–91, 372
Leeming, David, 307
Left Behind (LaHaye and Jenkins), 16
Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The (Irving), 335
“Lenore” (Poe), 325
Leslie, Edward, 395
Lesser, Wendy, 165–69
Less Than Zero (Ellis), 418
Leviathan (Hobbes), 406
Lewis, C. S., 126
Lewis, Sinclair, 304, 344
Liberal Imagination, The (Trilling), 163
Lichtenberg, G. C., 423
“Life Among the Ninnies” (Wolcott), 187
Life of Johnson (Boswell), 36
Life Sentences (Epstein), 195–97
“Life You Save May Be Your Own, The” (O’Connor), 415
“Ligeia” (Poe), 325, 331
Literary Education, A (Epstein), 193–94, 197
“Literary Life Today, The” (Epstein), 196
Lit Up (Denby), 149–59
Local Souls (Gurganus), 234–35, 240–46, 250–53, 260–66
London, Jack, 424
Lonely Crusade (Himes), 304
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, xxvii, 335
Longinus, Cassius, 171
Lost in Translation (Hoffman), 99
Love and Death in the American Novel (Fiedler), 333, 335
Love in the Ruins (Percy), 15
“Love Too Long” (Hannah), 393
Loving Literature (Lynch), 220–29
Lowell, Amy, 46
Lowell, Robert, 10, 11, 96, 99
Lucking Out (Wolcott), 186
Lueders, Edward, 348–49
Luther, Martin, 180
Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (Slater), 94–95, 99, 401–9
Lynch, Deidre Shauna, 220–29
Lynch, Thomas, 99
Macaulay, Rose, 36, 204
MacCarthy, Desmond, 62
MacDonald, Dwight, 187, 188, 214
Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 260
Maid’s Version, The (Woodrell), 356–61
Mailer, Norman, 62–63, 69, 99, 167, 186, 190, 208–9, 214–16, 351, 421
Making It (Podhoretz), 206–18
Malamud, Bernard, 16, 119, 120, 123
Malcolm, Janet, 167
Malone, Michael, 259
Malouf, David, 111–13
Man and Crisis (Ortega y Gasset), 368
Man and Superman (Shaw), 113
Mandelstam, Osip, 12
Mann, Thomas, 259, 423
Mansfield, Katherine, 46
Map of Misreading, A (Bloom), 176–77
Marginalia (Poe), 334
Marlowe, Christopher, 181
Martin, George R. R., 75
“Masque of the Red Death, The” (Poe), 330
Mather, Cotton, xvii
Mather, Increase, xvii
Matthew Arnold (Trilling), 163
“Matthew Arnold and the Resistance” (Epstein), 200
Matthiessen, F. O., xxiv–xxv, xxviii, xxx
Maugham, Somerset, 29, 32, 316
Mauriac, François, 15, 29
Max Jamison (Sheed), 117
McCarthy, Cormac, xxiii, 51–52, 355, 357, 359, 396, 420–32
McCarthy, Mary, xv, xxxii, 30, 188, 214
McCorkle, Jill, 259
Meaning of Culture, The (Powys), 7–8
Medea (Euripides), 260
Melville: A Biography (Robertson-Lorant), 314–16
Melville, Herman, xix–xxv, xxvii, xxix, 16, 62, 125–26, 245, 308–21, 333, 334, 345
Melville in Love (Shelden), 309–17
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (McCarthy), 30
Mencken, H. L., xxvi, 201–4, 335, 338, 344–49, 353
“Mencken on Trial” (Epstein), 203
Metamorphosis, The (Kafka), 256
Meyer, Stephenie, 66, 88
Middle of the Journey, The (Trilling), 162
Midnight Dreary (Walsh), 337
Miller, Hillis, 174
Million Little Pieces, A (Frey), 91–95, 99–100
Milton, John, xxi, 33–34, 42–43, 65, 105, 109, 126–28, 130–31, 135–36, 168, 175, 180–82, 317–19, 356, 368, 382, 420
Milton and Melville (Pommer), 317
“Minor Heroism” (Gurganus), 247–48
Miss Minerva and William Green Hill (Calhoun), 277
Mister Monkey (Prose), 433–37
Mitchell, Erika (E. L. James), 84–90
Moby-Dick (Melville), xix–xxv, xxix, 125–26, 308–20, 335
Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Shields), 268, 287
Money (Amis), 436
Montaigne, Michel de, 61, 195–96, 201, 299
“Morality of the Profession of Letters, The” (Stevenson), 154–55
More Die of Heartbreak (Bellow), 51, 109, 411–12
“Morella” (Poe), 325, 329
Morrison, Toni, 283
Mortality (Hitchens), 147
Moveable Feast, A (Hemingway), 93
Moviegoer, The (Percy), 17–18, 29
“Mr. Brain, He Want a Song” (Hannah), 392
“MS. Found in a Bottle” (Poe), 328
Mudrick, Marvin, 178
“Murders in the Rue Morgue, The” (Poe), 329–30
Murry, John Middleton, 46–47
Music After the Great War (Van Vechten), 345
Music and Bad Manners (Van Vechten), 348–49
“My Books” (Hunt), 32
My Bright Abyss (Wiman), 363–68
Myers, D. G., 21–23
“My Library” (Forster), 41
My Life as Author and Editor (Mencken), 345
“Mystery of Marie Rogêt, The” (Poe), 329–30
Nabokov, Vladimir, 24, 78, 166
Nafisi, Azar, 99, 157
Naipaul, V. S., 201
Name of the World, The (Johnson), 414
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The (Poe), 328
Native Son (Wright), 303
Nemerov, Harold, 20, 190–91
Never Die (Hannah), 396
Newman, Cardinal, 363
Nichols, Robert, 48
Nick Adams Stories, The (Hemingway), 412, 414
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22, 70–71, 110, 113, 138, 177, 326, 362, 369
Nigger Heaven (Van Vechten), 346, 350
Night (Wiesel), 157
Night and Day (Woolf), 36
“Night-Thoughts” (Young), 145
Nin, Anaïs, 187
Nobody Knows My Name (Baldwin), xv
No Country for Old Men (McCarthy), 421, 428
No Exit (Sartre), 384
No Name in the Street (Baldwin), 297
“Not Altogether Gone” (Wiman), 364
“Notes from a Confession” (Birkerts), 41
Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin), 299, 300–303
“Nothing Personal” (Baldwin), 295
“Novel as a Function of American Democracy, The” (Ellison), xxiii–xxiv
Oates, Joyce Carol, 186, 189, 348
O’Connor, Flannery, xxiii, xxvi–xxvii, 20, 23–26, 29–30, 57, 262, 277–78, 297, 355, 357, 361, 371–72, 381, 398, 412, 415, 424
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 407
Of Plymouth Plantation (Bradford), xviii
O’Hara, John, 243
Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens), 49
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Gurganus), 234, 238–40, 250, 253, 258, 260–61
Omoo (Melville), 308–9
“On Common-Place Critics” (Hazlitt), 122
O’Neill, Eugene, 344
“One’s-Self I Sing” (Whitman), xx
“One Time” (Wiman), 364
On Native Grounds (Kazin), 349
“On the Hill” (Spencer), 374
“On the Pleasure of Hating” (Hazlitt), 50–51, 58–59
On the Road (Kerouac), 411
Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery (Illouz), 85
Optimist’s Daughter, The (Welty), 371
Orchard Keeper, The (McCarthy), 421
Oresteia, The (Aeschylus), 107
Ortega y Gasset, José, 368
Orwell, George, 23–24, 36, 151, 185, 197, 293, 319–20
Othello (Shakespeare), 104, 181
Outer Dark (McCarthy), 421
Outlaw Album, The (Woodrell), 356, 361
Ovid, 57
Ozick, Cynthia, xxxii, 117–24, 161, 181, 187
Paglia, Camille, xxi, 132
Paley, Grace, 246, 253
Palimpsest (Vidal), 213
Paradise Lost (Milton), xxi, 42–43, 105, 109, 126–28, 135–36, 180, 182, 317–19
Parker, Dorothy, xxvi, 343
Parker, Hershel, 308–9, 313–15
Partial Payments (Epstein), 201
Pater, Walter, 166, 171, 172, 188, 225
Patterson, James, 81
Percy, Walker, 15–20, 23–24, 29, 30
Personal Narrative (Edwards), xix
Peter Whiffle (Van Vechten), 343, 353–54
Petrarch, 129
Phillips, William, 214
“Philosophy of Composition, The” (Poe), 323–24
“Philosophy of Furniture, The” (Poe), 335
Picoult, Jodi, 75
Pictures from an Institution (Jarrell), 224
“Piece Work” (Epstein), 200–202
Pierre (Melville), xxiv–xxv, 312
Pindar, 106
Pinter, Harold, 382
“Pit and the Pendulum, The” (Poe), 327
Plath, Sylvia, 11, 151
Plato, 329
Plausible Prejudices (Epstein), 203–4
Plays Well with Others (Gurganus), 234, 239–40, 244, 253, 255, 259, 436
Plimpton, George, 343
Plutarch, 64
Podhoretz, Norman, 206–18
Poe, Edgar Allan, xxii, xxv, xxvii, 153, 155, 321–39, 371, 390, 395
“Poetic Principle, The” (Poe), 324, 328
Poetry and Fiction (Nemerov), 190–91
Poetry and Repression (Bloom), 176
Point Counter Point (Huxley), 47
Pommer, Henry, 317
Pope, Alexander, 48
Portis, Charles, 355
Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth), xxv
Pound, Ezra, 77, 78, 165
Powell, Padgett, 377–86, 424
Power and the Glory, The (Greene), 27
“Powerhouse” (Welty), 391
Powys, John Cowper, 7–8, 77
Practical Heart, The (Gurganus), 234, 240, 259
Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 98, 279
“Premature Burial, The” (Poe), 328
Price, Reynolds, 253
Principles of Literary Criticism (Richards), 79
Prise, Francine, 433–37
Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, The (Gissing), 31–32, 39, 44
Professional Correctness (Fish), 130
Promised Land, The (Antin), xxix–xxx
Proust, Marcel, 39, 52–53, 184, 229, 240, 408
“Prozac, with Knife” (Epstein), 197
“Pugilist at Rest, The” (Jones), 396
Quiet American, The (Greene), 29
Rabbit, Run (Updike), 278
Rabbit at Rest (Ford), 438
Rahv, Philip, 96–99, 214
Rand, Ayn, 187, 216, 289
Rank, Otto, 106
Rankin, Tom, 259
Ransom, John Crowe, xii
“Raven, The” (Poe), 325, 338
Ray (Hannah), 390, 395
Razor’s Edge, The (Maugham), 32
Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi), 99, 157
Reason, Faith, and Revolution (Eagleton), 137
Redburn (Melville), 318
“Red-Herring Theory, The” (Updike), 313
Remembrance of Things Past (Proust), 52–53
Remnick, David, 188
Representative Men (Emerson), xxiv–xxv
“Return Trip” (Spencer), 373
“Reviewing and Being Reviewed” (Epstein), 194, 198–201, 203
Richard III (Shakespeare), 105
Richards, I. A., 21, 79, 165
Richardson, Samuel, 89, 260
Ricks, Christopher, 216
“Ride Westerly for Pusalina” (Hannah), 394
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 142, 368
Rimbaud, Arthur, 315
“River, The” (O’Connor), 25, 415
Road, The (McCarthy), 421, 428
Robertson-Lorant, Laurie, 314–16
Rock Springs (Ford), 441
Roethke, Theodore, 99, 112, 362
Roiphe, Katie, xxxii, 88, 140–47
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 67
Rosenberg, Harold, 198
Rosenfeld, Isaac, 214
Rossetti, Christina, 141
Roth, Philip, xxv, 16–17, 73, 203, 395
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 36, 97–98, 142
Rowling, J. K., 84
Ruin the Sacred Truths (Bloom), 173, 180
Running with Scissors (Burroughs), 98
Ruskin, John, 193
Russell, Bertrand, 47–48
Russell, Jeffrey Burton, 292–93
Sacks, Oliver, 147
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 204
“Saints Have Mothers” (Gurganus), 240, 244, 255, 262–63
Salter, James, 35, 44
Santayana, George, 183–84, 201, 408
Sappho, 89
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 40, 151, 384, 401
Save the World on Your Own Time (Fish), 129, 136
Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), xxiv–xxv, xxviii–xxix
Scholar’s Tale, A (Hartman), 178
Scholem, Gershom, 119
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 81, 326, 379
Schulz, Bruno, 120
Scott, Sir Walter, 68, 70
Second Coming, The (Percy), 18
“Seduction and Betrayal” (Hardwick), 88
Self-Control (Brunton), 67–70
Sendak, Maurice, 140–47
Sense and Sensibility (Austen), 67–70
“September 1, 1939” (Auden), 394
Settle, Elkanah, 63
Sexton, Anne, 11, 99
Shadow of a Great Rock, The (Bloom), 170, 174, 179–80
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Bloom), 180–81
Shakespeare, William, xx, 65, 67, 80, 104–5, 128, 168, 175, 176, 179–82, 211, 255, 295, 317, 394, 407, 420, 423
Shaw, George Bernard, 77, 94, 113, 370–71
Sheed, Wilfrid, 117, 207–9, 216
Shelden, Michael, 309–17
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 166, 173–75, 224, 291, 368
Shelley’s Mythmaking (Bloom), 173
Shields, Charles, 268, 287
Sick Soldier at Your Door (Hannah), 399
“Sightings” (Spencer), 375
Sinclair, Upton, xxix–xxx
Sitwell, Edith, 28
Slater, Lauren, 94–95, 99, 400–409
Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (De Vries), 103
“Small, Good Thing, A” (Carver), 418
Smith, Lee, 259
Snobbery (Epstein), 204
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 197
Song of Myself (Whitman), 212
Sonnets (Shakespeare), 407
“Sonnet—to Science” (Poe), 338
“Sonny’s Blues” (Baldwin), 293, 391
Son of a Servant, The (Strindberg), 370
Sontag, Susan, xxxi, 41, 71–72, 140–47, 187, 188, 215
Sophocles, 262
Sorrows of Young Werther, The (Goethe), 37–38
“Southern Landscape, A” (Spencer), 376
Sparks, Nicholas, 75
Spencer, Elizabeth, 259–60, 277–78, 370–76
Spenser, Edmund, 65
Spinoza, Baruch, 32
Splendid Drunken Twenties, The (Van Vechten), 344
“Spy of Long Root, The” (Hannah), 392–93
Stars at Noon (Johnson), 414
Starting Over (Spencer), 371, 372–76
Steel, Danielle, 77, 81
Stein, Gertrude, 344, 351
Steiner, George, 119
Stendhal, 111
Sterne, Laurence, 24
Stevens, Wallace, 175, 182, 344–45, 368
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 154–55, 303, 328–29, 408
“Stop Me Before I Write Again” (Wolcott), 186
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, xxix–xxx
Strayed, Cheryl, 98
Strindberg, August, 370–71
Stuckey, W. J., 279–80, 283–84
Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence), xxii–xxiii, 46
“Study of Poetry, The” (Arnold), 152–53
“Sunday Teasing” (Updike), 16
Sure Hand of God, The (Caldwell), 304
Surprised by Sin (Fish), 126–28
Suttree (McCarthy), 421
Swift, Jonathan, 168
Tastemaker, The (White), 340–42
Tate, Allen, xii, 123, 371, 390, 395
Taylor, Edward, xviii
“Tell-Tale Heart, The” (Poe), 327
Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald), 241
Tennis Handsome, The (Hannah), 391
Terkel, Studs, 295
“Testimony of Pilot” (Hannah), 390–91, 394
Theatre of the Absurd, The (Esslin), 377–79
There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (Fish), 129
Think Again (Fish), 133–39
Thomas, Dylan, 140–47, 238, 391–92
Thompson, Hunter S., 188
Thoreau, Henry David, xxiv–xxv, 321, 440
Those Who Write for Immortality (Jackson), 63–72
“Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night” (Hannah), 392
Timberg, Scott, 3–14
“Tip to Professors” (Fish), 135
“To Build a Fire” (London), 424
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 197
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), 267–91, 372
Tolstaya, Tatyana, xiii
Tolstoy, Leo, 165, 168, 183, 237, 423
Tomato Red (Woodrell), 360
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot), xxix, 97
Tragedy and Philosphy (Kaufmann), 369
Train Dreams (Johnson), 414
Tree of Smoke (Johnson), 414–15
Trilling, Diana, 162
Trilling, Lionel, 118, 119, 123, 132, 160–64, 188, 209, 214, 226
Trouble with Principle, The (Fish), 131–33
True at First Light (Hemingway), 286
“Truth of Intercourse” (Stevenson), 408
Twain, Mark, xxi, xxiii, xxv–xxvi, 49–50, 61, 114, 281–82, 408
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne), 36–37
Twilight (Gay), 396
Twilight (Meyer), 66, 88
“Two Cheers for Double Standards” (Fish), 135
Tyndale, William, 179–80, 181, 358
Typee (Melville), 308–9, 316
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), xxix–xxx
Undertaking, The (Lynch), 99
“United States of Lyncherdom, The” (Twain), 281
Unnamable, The (Beckett), 380
“Unpacking My Library” (Benjamin), 39–40
“Unread Book Route, The” (Updike), 39
Updike, John, 16, 39, 140–47, 185, 188, 203, 278, 313, 392–93, 417, 438
Valéry, Paul, 130, 174–75
Van Vechten, Carl, xxxii, 340–54
Verlaine, Paul, 315
Verne, Jules, 36–37, 324
Vidal, Gore, xvi, xix–xx, 28, 53, 61–63, 77, 148, 188, 213, 215
Violet Hour, The (Roiphe), 140–47
Virgil, xxi, 64, 155, 423
Visionary Company, The (Bloom), 173
Voice at the Back Door, The (Spencer), 277–78, 372
Volcano Lover, The (Sontag), 41
Voltaire, 7
Vonnegut, Kurt, 151, 158, 357
Vox (Baker), 89
Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 158, 377–86
Waiting for the End (Fiedler), 335
Walcott, Derek, xxiv
Walden (Thoreau), xxiv–xxv
Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Bloom), 176, 183
Walpole, Hugh, 200
Walsh, John Evangelist, 337
War and Peace (Tolstoy), 237
Waste Land, The (Eliot), xxvii, 141
Waugh, Evelyn, 23, 28, 36, 76, 256
“We Are Fossils from the Future” (Gurganus), 239
Webster, Noah, xviii–xix
“Wedding Visitor, The” (Spencer), 375, 376
Weil, Simone, 296
Weisberger, Lauren, 80
Wellek, René, 223
Wells, H. G., xxvii
Welty, Eudora, 371–72, 376, 391, 439
West, Rebecca, 55–56, 200
Western Canon, The (Bloom), 173, 178, 180
Weston, Ruth, 393–94
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (Whitman), 182
Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (Bloom), 173
White, E. B., 20
White, Edmund, 247
White, Edward, 340–42, 345–46, 348, 350–54
White Fang (London), 424
White People (Gurganus), 234, 240
Whiteside, Thomas, 5
Whitman, Walt, xx, xxii, xxiv–xxv, 109, 120, 147, 170, 175, 182–83, 212, 242, 254, 321, 334, 337–38, 359
“Why I Live at the P.O.” (Welty), 371
Why I Read (Lesser), 166–69
“Why I Write” (Hannah), 397
Why Trilling Matters (Kirsch), 161–64
Wiesel, Elie, 157
Wilbur, Richard, 324, 330, 331, 333
Wild (Strayed), 98
Wilde, Oscar, xxii, 24, 46, 79, 92–93, 95, 119, 123–24, 153, 162, 163, 171, 185, 193, 225, 252, 256, 280–81, 293–94, 299, 327, 341, 343, 400–401, 406–7
Williams, William Carlos, xvii, xxi, 334–36, 338, 364
Wilson, Edmund, 193, 197, 201, 204, 223, 258, 278–79, 329, 332, 338
Wiman, Christian, 362–69
Winters, Yvor, xii, 161
Winter’s Bone (Woodrell), 355–58
Wodehouse, P. G., 256
Wolcott, James, 185–91
Wolfe, Thomas, 373–74
Woman Named Drown, A (Powell), 382
Woodrell, Daniel, 355–61
Woolf, Virginia, 36, 69, 77, 119, 173, 238, 299
Words, The (Sartre), 40
Wordsworth, William, 63, 68, 70, 98, 113, 117, 279, 365
“World Is Too Much with Us, The” (Wordsworth), 113
“Worm in the Apple, The” (Cheever), 249
“Wreck of the Deutschland, The” (Hopkins), xiii
Wright, Richard, 302–3
“Writers, Visible and Invisible” (Ozick), 123
Writing Was Everything (Kazin), 163
Yates, Richard, 394
Yeats (Bloom), 174
Yeats, William Butler, 6, 140, 174, 260, 371, 385
Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Hannah), 393
You & Me (Powell), 380–86
Young, Edward, 145