Writing in America - Softcover

"A true classic offering timeless yet timely commentaries and insights into the art and craft of writing."--Midwest Book Review "You could say the inspiration for The [New York] Review of Books went back even further, to 1959 and Elizabeth Hardwick's "The Decline of Book Reviewing" in Harper's. That essay is crucial." --Robert Silvers "editor and cofounder of the New York Review of Books "

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.