Curated playlist
The New Yorker people
- F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing his work was forgotten. The Great Gatsby later sold millions.
- Saul BellowSaul Bellow learned he had entered the U.S. illegally as a child when he tried to enlist. He became a citizen in 1941.
- Leonard CohenLeonard Cohen once predicted, "I feel I have a huge posthumous career in front of me." He said it long before he died, and the forecast turned out to be sound. Cohen was a Canadian poet, novelist, singer and songwriter, and for much of his…
- 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.…
- Patti SmithPatti Smith, the American singer, songwriter, poet and author, lost her place in the middle of a song at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm. The date was the 10th of December 2016. She was standing in for Bob Dylan, winner of the…
- Jonathan FranzenA gate-crasher once pulled novelist Jonathan Franzen's glasses off his face. He jokingly demanded $100,000 in 2010.
- Edmund WilsonCritic Edmund Wilson mailed strangers a postcard listing over two dozen things he would not do.
- William DalrympleA book on an 1839 war led William Dalrymple to brief Afghan President Hamid Karzai. He also briefed the White House.
- Michael CeraMichael Cera, the Canadian actor and musician born on the 7th of June 1988, owes his career to a case of chickenpox. At the age of three, stuck in bed, he watched Ghostbusters over and over. He memorized every line of dialogue and came to…
- Lena DunhamLena Dunham once filmed herself in a bikini, brushing her teeth in a public fountain at Oberlin College. She posted the video online, and it went viral. The reaction startled her. Pages of comments argued about how fat she was or was not,…
- Yukio MishimaYukio Mishima shouted to soldiers from a Tokyo balcony in 1970, then killed himself.
- Stephen GreenblattStephen Greenblatt was stunned when universities sought experts in "New Historicism," a phrase he coined.
- Hannah FryHannah Fry told a BBC Four audience in 2018 that she was about to simulate a fatal outbreak across the whole United Kingdom. If the experiment worked, she said, it would "save lives when, not if, a real pandemic hits." The programme was…
- Yves BonnefoyYves Bonnefoy refused to call himself a poet. He said he was a critic or a historian.
- Lewis MumfordLewis Mumford argued the clock, not the steam engine, drove the Industrial Revolution. He never finished college.
- Vladimir SorokinRussian writer Vladimir Sorokin trained as an engineer, not a writer. His books were banned in the Soviet era.