By: Joshua Glenn

Most of my favorite campus novels — from Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim to, say, Don DeLillo’s White Noise — were penned by a novelist who’d done short time […]

By: Douglas Wolk

JOHN ZORN (born 1953) has been the nexus of the musical avant-garde in New York for a couple of decades — an unbelievably prolific composer and performer and curator and label-dude whose early look-how-eclectic-I-am tendencies […]

By: David Smay

He helped free science fiction from 19th-century (or any) values.

By: Franklin Bruno

He began his critical career as a Welsh signalman’s son drawn to English literary tradition, and ended it as a Cambridge don extolling the vitality of rural and working-class life. In between, RAYMOND WILLIAMS (1921-88) […]

By: Katie Hennessey

Though often cast as a lovable father in middlebrow comedies like The Shaggy Dog and the long-running TV show My Three Sons, FRED MACMURRAY (1908-91) was more convincing in noir films. In Double Indemnity (1944), […]

By: Mimi Lipson

Filmmaker PRESTON STURGES (1898-1959) made a joyful mockery of the Hays Code with his improbably wholesome card sharks, unwed mothers, imposters and flimflammers, his ballot box stuffers, shoplifters, party girls and bigamists. “I can’t keep […]

By: David Smay

Insanely prolific, unbelievably vital, formally inventive.

By: Greg Rowland

All hail the Mighty Fin! For was it not JIMMY FINLAYSON (1887-1953), third banana in 33 Laurel and Hardy films, who offered us emancipation through his unique enactment of The Double Take & Fade Away? […]

By: Lynn Peril

She had oodles of cash, acres of style, and eventually her very own 18th-century palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal, where she slept in a sterling silver bed designed by Alexander Calder. There was heartache — […]

By: Annie Nocenti

“My nose is blown, doc,” mopes a bandaged bloodhound cop as he sags against a panel border. In “No Nose is Good Nose,” Dr. Howland Owl laughs at the patient, violating his “hippocritical oaf.” Set […]

By: Matthew Battles

JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899–1986). The gaucho stood over the dead man, smeared the blade of his facón across his poncho, and slid it away somewhere within the folds of cloth. The smell of blood already […]

By: Tor Aarestad

The most widely known American anthropologist since Margaret Mead, CLIFFORD GEERTZ (1926-2006) was instrumental in turning anthropology into the respectable and (more importantly) theory-poachable discipline it became in the 1970s and ’80s. How? Though he […]

By: Ingrid Schorr

Despite her reputation as the witty gal of the Algonquin Round Table, DOROTHY PARKER (1893-1967) dismissed the clique as “just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were.” They […]

By: Sarah Weinman

The thing about KIM CATTRALL (born 1956) is that when she was young she was middle-aged, and in middle age found her youth — that is, she was playing Samantha Jones in lowbrow movies years […]

By: Erik Davis

He introduced “outsideness” — cosmic dread — to science fiction.