Phillip Lopate, a Brooklyn native, has written three personal essay collections—Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, and Portrait of My Body; two novels, Confessions of Summer and The Rug Merchant; two poetry collections; a collection of his movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically; and an urbanist meditation, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan. Lopate also has edited several anthologies, including The Art of the Personal Essay and Writing New York. His essays, fiction, poetry, film, and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays (1987), several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire, Threepenny Review, the New York Times, Preservation, Cite, Metropolis, and many other periodicals and anthologies. Lopate has also taught creative writing and literature at Fordham University, Cooper Union, the University of Houston, and New York University. He is a Professor at Columbia University, where he directs the nonfiction concentration in the graduate writing program.
"Each of the 14 essays in this collection was originally presented
at Bennington College's Ben Belitt lectures series which was
founded in 1978 to honor poet, critic and Bennington teacher
Belitt. Scholarly in tone, the pieces cover a wide range of
literary topics, including an article by the late Irving Howe on
becoming a literary critic; a discussion by Nobel laureate Nadine
Gordimer on the relationship between politics and fiction; an
offering by Harold Bloom on the sexual imagery in Walt Whitman's
poetry and Belitt's own lecture on literature and religious belief.
As Lopate ( Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis ) points out in
his introduction, the selections, although written by outstanding
authors and critics, lack ethnic variety and include only two
essays by women. The collection will be of interest primarily to
serious students of literature.
*—Publishers Weekly*
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