Index

Prologue: Starting out in Chicago The Fifties and before Spanish letter Illinois journey The University as villain The sharp edge of life Laughter in the ghetto: on Sholom Aleichem Dreiser and the triumph of art Hemingway and the image of man Man underground: on Ralph Ellison The 1,001 afternoons of Ben Hecht The swamp of prosperity: on Philip Roth The writer and the audience Distractions of a fiction writer Deep readers of the world, beware! A talk with the yellow kid The Sixties The sealed treasure On Jewish storytelling Up from the pushcart: on Abraham Cahan Where do we go from here? The future of fiction At the movies On Shakespeare's sonnets The writer as moralist Beatrice Webb's America Recent fiction: a tour of inspection Barefoot boy: on Yevgeny Yevtushenko My man Bummidge The thinking man's waste land Cloister culture Israel: the six-day war Skepticism and the depth of life The Seventies On America: remarks at the U.S. Cultural Center in Tel Aviv New York: world-famous impossibility Machines and storybooks: Literature in the age of technology A world too much with us An interview with myself The Nobel lecture American who are also Jews: upon receiving the Democratic Legacy Award of the Anti-Defamation League The day they signed the treaty The Eighties In the days of Mr. Roosevelt Reflections on Alexis de Tocqueville: a seminar at the University of Chicago My Paris Foreword to 'The revolt of the Masses' by José Ortega y Gasset The civilized barbarian reader A Jewish writer in America: a lecture Chicago: the city that was, the city that is The Nineties and after There is simply too much to think about Writers, intellectuals, politics: mainly reminiscence Papuans and Zulus Alone in mixed company Ralph Ellison in Tivoli Literature: the next chapter Wit irony fun games Vermont: the good place Winter in Tuscany Before I go away: a words and images interview with Norman Manea "I got a scheme!": with Philip Roth Coda: Why not?