Vanity Fair's Writers on Writers

December 5, 2016
Rich and delicious, this collection features 41 entertaining and informative pieces originally published in Vanity Fair by famous writers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Christopher Hitchens, and Jacqueline Woodson, analyzing other celebrated authors. Details of the subjects’ craft—schedules and routines—are discussed, along with insights into their art, and how the ups and downs of their lives influenced what they wrote. Each article starts with a career highlight, a big success, or a controversy. Next is a brief biography, often followed by some personal reminiscence. Readers learn of the authors’ families and early lives; what they overcame to achieve initial success; how they were critically received and how they influenced other writers; and, for many, the eventual decline of their skills and reputation. The selection of subjects is diverse, including W.H. Auden and Jacqueline Susann. Likewise, the analysis of the work ranges from formal literary criticism to appreciations of works initially dismissed as trash. The magazine’s writers are witty and insightful. James Wolcott on Jack Kerouac: He “committed suicide on the installment plan.” Michael Lewis on Tom Wolfe: “He moves back and forth like a bridge player, ruffing the city and the country against each other.” Each essay is reason enough to read (or reread) the subject’s work.

A coked-up Capote, a torn-apart Tartt, a bellowing Bellow: longtime Vanity Fair editor Carter assembles shimmering pieces on the literary life.Founded in 1913, Vanity Fair, writes Carter, was "immediately a hothouse for literary talent." Eleven decades later, it continues to draw some of the most prominent names in literature, who here offer a kind of informal genealogy of contemporary American letters, looking at shared influences and inspirations. For instance, when One Hundred Years of Solitude burst on the scene in the 1960s, Toni Morrison, then an acquisitions editor, had an early look and decided to jump ship and dedicate herself to writing. "I got permission from Garcia Marquez," she says by way of Paul Elie's lively history of the book, to write Song of Solomon. Junot Diaz, Salman Rushdie, and John Irving also took their own cues from the Colombian writer's pages. Less influential figures pop up in the anthology as well, including the now unjustly forgotten Ward Just, who arrived in Washington, D.C., and, by David Halberstam's account, made the Atlantic Seaboard into "Just Country": "he was struck," writes Halberstam, "by the contrast between the Kennedy people, so coolly arrogant and eager to rule not just America but also the world, and the seemingly doddering Eisenhower people, most of them older businessmen, who could hardly wait to return to the bland comforts of the Midwest." Like Just, some of the writers will seem like figures from ancient history at first, but their later contemporaries at Vanity Fair bring them back to life. Dorothy Parker, writes the late Christopher Hitchens, "did not forsake her habit of stretching like a feline and then whipping out with a murderous paw." All, subjects and writers alike, are people whose company a literary-minded reader will seek, and all are richly present here.You'll be forgiven for thinking that a place in national politics or pro hockey would be a more restful and attainable aspiration, but this collection is essential to anyone thinking of taking up the writer's trade. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 15, 2016

This anthology from Vanity Fair magazine, compiled by its editor, Carter, collects the "best pieces about writers from the modern-era magazine--forty-three essays from the past thirty-five years," and the many writings here, by distinguished authors, take a wide-ranging view of their subjects. The figures observed here are often aging, such as Eudora Welty and Reynolds Price, and are profiled by those who have known them for decades or met them in their later years, while others who have passed receive elegiac remembrances. Some, including Jack Kerouac and Truman Capote, are portrayed in decline and deterioration, on a downward trajectory from their literary heights. Individual pieces stand out. One is a literal hunt for a lost archive of Ernest Hemingway's papers in Cuba, while another is Michael Lewis's terrific search to understand Tom Wolfe and his singular contribution to New Journalism. Taken together, each essay tends to focus not deeply on the writer's work but rather on the character of the life lived, with the prose becoming a backdrop to each authors' "writerly self." VERDICT A compelling anthology pairing essayists and writerly subjects that will be enjoyed by readers of Vanity Fair and book lovers in general. [See Prepub Alert, 4/18/16.]--Doug Diesenhaus, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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