Curated playlist

American male essayists

Stephen KingA minivan hit Stephen King on a Maine road in June 1999. A dog in the back distracted the driver.
Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe's executor used forged letters to paint him as a drunken madman.
Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway, only 18, carried Italian soldiers to safety despite being seriously wounded by mortar fire.
Herman MelvilleHerman Melville's death notice misspelled his great novel as "Mobie Dick."
T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot compared an evening sky to a patient on a surgical table.
H. P. LovecraftH. P. Lovecraft died in 1937 virtually unknown to readers. His monsters later became global touchstones.
Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden by hiding in an underground meat locker.
Ezra PoundEzra Pound cut T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land by about half. Eliot called the edits proof of Pound's critical genius.
Hunter S. ThompsonHunter S. Thompson's Gonzo style began as a Kentucky Derby deadline scramble. He mailed pages ripped from his notebook.
John CageJohn Cage once had a pianist play nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Audience noise became the music.
Salman RushdieA fatwa ordering Salman Rushdie's execution was broadcast on Radio Tehran on Valentine's Day 1989.
Philip K. DickPhilip K. Dick died four months before Blade Runner opened. He never saw the film that made his name famous.
Thomas PynchonThomas Pynchon told his agent in April 1964 that he had four novels in progress at once. If they came out on paper anything like they looked inside his head, he wrote, the result would be "the literary event of the millennium." The writer…
David Foster WallaceDavid Foster Wallace wrote a novel that Time magazine placed among the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. That book was Infinite Jest, and it reached readers in 1996. Years later, the critic David Ulin wrote…
Arthur MillerArthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in less than six weeks. He finished the first act in less than a day.
W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died hours after reading his poems aloud in a Vienna hotel.
Cormac McCarthyCormac McCarthy bought a portable Olivetti Lettera 32 at a Knoxville pawn shop for $50, shortly before a trip to Europe in the early 1960s. Over the next five decades he typed about five million words on it. He kept it running by blowing…
James BaldwinThe FBI file on James Baldwin ran to 1,884 pages, gathered from 1960 until the early 1970s. In that era of surveillance of American writers, agents filled 276 pages on Richard Wright and 110 on Truman Capote. Henry Miller rated just nine.…
Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at age 10, about the fall of Barcelona.
Ralph EllisonA 1967 fire destroyed more than 300 pages of Ralph Ellison's second novel. He never finished it.
Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap argued that most deep philosophical questions were meaningless.
Jonathan FranzenA gate-crasher once pulled novelist Jonathan Franzen's glasses off his face. He jokingly demanded $100,000 in 2010.
Paul KrugmanPaul Krugman turned to economics because psychohistory was fiction. Asimov's novels inspired him.
Anthony BourdainAnthony Bourdain was filming an episode of his series No Reservations in Beirut in July 2006 when a war cut the shoot short. The Israel-Lebanon conflict broke out after his crew had recorded only a few hours of footage. What the producers…
Claude ShannonClaude Shannon built a mechanical mouse that learned its way through a maze. He named the 1950 machine Theseus.
Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov coined the word "robotics" in a 1941 story, thinking it was just a natural term.
Jerry FodorPhilosopher Jerry Fodor argued that thinking works like a language inside the brain. He called it Mentalese.
Dave WolvertonDave Wolverton chose a second name partly because of where books were placed in bookstores. He was born John David Wolverton, and he published as both Dave Wolverton and David Farland. His reasoning was practical. A fantasy author needed a…
Hilary PutnamHilary Putnam invented a leading theory of the mind, then spent years taking it apart.
Stephen GreenblattStephen Greenblatt was stunned when universities sought experts in "New Historicism," a phrase he coined.
Robert ReichRobert Reich stands 4 feet 11 inches tall, and he has spent his working life arguing with people who hold far more power than he does. Born on the 24th of June 1946, he became an American lawyer, professor, author and political…
Christopher HitchensOn the 8th of October 2011, Christopher Hitchens collected the Richard Dawkins Award at the Texas Freethought Convention. It was his final public appearance. Christopher Eric Hitchens, a British and American author and journalist, had been…
John RawlsJohn Rawls, an American philosopher, wrote a book of roughly 600 pages that protesters held up in front of government officials at Tiananmen Square in 1989. It was a dense academic treatise called A Theory of Justice. More than 300,000…
Victor Davis HansonAfter earning a Stanford PhD, Victor Davis Hanson went home and farmed. He grew orchards and vineyards for four years.
Cornel WestYale punished Cornel West for a protest arrest by canceling his 1987 spring leave. He then commuted to Paris to teach.
James GleickJames Gleick helped inspire Ian Malcolm, a character in Jurassic Park.
George SteinerGeorge Steiner was born Francis George Steiner on the 23rd of April 1929. He was a literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist and educator, and he is described as both French and American. Harriet Harvey-Wood, a former literature…