Is Joseph Epstein America's finest essayist? I know I've never read anyone who is better.
Dwight Macdonald was the intellectual par excellence, which is to say without any specialized knowledge he was prepared to comment on everything, boisterously and always with what seemed an unwavering confidence.
Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography
The mark of a great essayist is that you can read an enjoy them even if you initially have no keen interest in the subject of the piece at hand. Epstein never fails that test.
Jacques Barzun reminds us that “Love of what is fine should not make one finicky”. Essays in Biography embodies this worthy credo. An essay on Michael Jordan exhibits the same insight and skill as those on Susan Sontag or Bernard Malamud.
Every now and then Epstein drops a bombshell into the course of his pleasant rambles. They are not delivered as critical thunderbolts -– just an offhand comment that can change your whole outlook on a subject.
….
[Saul Bellow] created no memorable female characters. Neither, one needs to add here, have Philip Roth or John Updike or Norman Mailer, whose female characters exist chiefly to service their author's sexual fantasies. The great novelists -- Balzac, Tolstoy, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Marguerite Yourncenar -- were androgynous in their powers of creation. Recent male American novelists almost universally fail this test.
Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world's evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life.
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