By: Joshua Glenn

Perfect detach­ment enables us to see things…

By: Brian Berger

EUCHRERISK, MERCI BUCKUP, AND MIND WHO YOU’RE PUCKING, FLEEBY.

By: Tim Carmody

Audio recordings of LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-67) are disarmingly contemporary. On those recordings, he sounds like no one more than his least likely heir, Allen Ginsberg, who borrowed both his incorporation of loose musical forms from […]

By: Matthew De Abaitua

GRANT MORRISON’s (born 1960) house was on a distinguish­ed street in Glasgow, purchased with the proceeds from his 1989 Batman graphic novel, Arkham Asylum. In the attic was a replica of his teenage bedroom; downstairs […]

By: Brian Berger

One of America’s greatest comic writers, RICHARD BRAUTIGAN (1935-84) was also, shockingly, one of its most successful. Raised in the northwest by a waitress mother, after a rough early adulthood (mental hospital, electroshock therapy) he […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Given his much-imper­son­ated rasp and gift for Menckenesque quips (“Horse sense is the thing a horse has that keeps it from betting on people”), it’s surprising to find W. C. FIELDS (1879-1946) telling Photoplay, as […]

By: Douglas Wolk

The greatest rapper of all time? That’s a contentious one. But if we rephrase it as “most quotable rapper,” then there’s a shoo-in: William Michael Griffin Jr., the god-on-the-mic better known as RAKIM (born 1968). […]

By: Brian Berger

How can something so goddamn loud be so mysterious? That’s only the most obvious question listeners to the explosive music of ELMORE JAMES (1918-63) will confront. His biography until age 33 tantalizes: raised in the […]

By: Sarah Weinman

Back Into Forward, JULES FEIFFER’s (born 1929) forthcoming autobiography, will devote a great deal of close attention to the impossibly long-legged, stretched-out figures who populate his cartoons — and who, the author claims, “take the […]

By: Mark Kingwell

When, towards the end of her life, VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941), pioneer of literary modernism, met Sigmund Freud, pioneer of psychic spelunking, the latter presented her with a narcissus. It is not clear what Freud meant […]

By: Ingrid Schorr

Idealistic, dogged, and deeply influenced by the writings of Whitehead and Kant, ROBERT MOTHERWELL (1915-91) welcomed any opportunity to make visible his ethic, which, he wrote, was “my identity as a man.” Though his 1950 […]

By: Joe Alterio

For Europhiles who wish they were smoking Gauloises on a balcony somewhere, the plunk-plunk of DJANGO REINHARDT’s (1910-53) simple but completely original jazz stylings evoke a more romantic time. However, Reinhardt’s cultural appeal is more […]

By: David Smay

The writer best known in his time for Sailor Steve Costigan and Breckinridge Elkins conjured something more rare when he created Conan the Barbarian: a pop cultural icon. ROBERT E. HOWARD (1906-36) might be the […]

By: Greg Rowland

He took the weight of English sexual anxiety on his shoulders.

By: Annie Nocenti

Every child dreams of running away and joining the circus. The 12-year-old FEDERICO FELLINI (1920-93) actually did it, kicking off his enduring love affair with spectacle. Early works like La Strada (1954) and Nights of […]