“Standards” is the only piece in this book that was not commissioned. It was published in Harper’s in 1991.
“Jack London and His Call of the Wild” combines a review of the three-volume edition of his Letters and of American Dreamers by Clarice Stasz, published in The New York Times Book Review in 1989, with the introduction to the Vintage Library of America edition of The Call of the Wild, published in 1990.
“Theodore Dreiser: Book One” was written as the introduction for the Bantam Classics edition of Sister Carrie, published in 1982. “Book Two” was originally a review of Dreiser’s second, incomplete, and only recently published work, An Amateur Laborer, and appeared in The New York Times Book Review in 1983.
“Ernest Hemingway, R.I.P.,” a review of the posthumous and heavily edited novel The Garden of Eden, was first published in The New York Times Book Review in 1983.
“Orwell’s 1984” was published anticipatorily in 1983, in different form, by Playboy magazine.
“Ronald Reagan” was written for The Nation in 1980.
“Commencement,” an address given to the graduating class of 1989 at Brandeis University, was published later the same year in The Nation.
“The Character of Presidents” was originally published in The Nation during the election campaign of 1992.
“The Beliefs of Writers” was the Hopwood Lecture delivered to graduating students of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Michigan in 1984; it was published in 1985 in The Michigan Quarterly Review. (An abridged version appeared in The New York Times Book Review under the title “The Passion of Their Calling.”)
“A Citizen Reads the Constitution” was originally an address given at Constitution Hall in Philadelphia in 1986 under the auspices of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. It was published by The Nation in 1987.
“The Nineteenth New York” was originally published in Architectural Digest in 1992.
“False Documents” was first published in slightly different form in New American Review (Bantam), 1977.
“James Wright at Kenyon” appeared in the Gettysburg Review in 1990.
“Two Waldens” consists of remarks made at the Walden Woods Project Press Conference held in Boston, Massachusetts, on April 25, 1990. This conference inititiated a citizens’ effort to purchase Walden Woods from private developers and preserve it for posterity.