Some writers have a huge hunger to write and publish. Others, it seems, don’t. For instance, Evan Hunter, who started life as Salvatore Lombino and employed several pseudonyms, started his [...]
When Hawk was in the process of becoming a hawk, a man walked by and looked up into the tree and yelled, “What you need is to go get your-self [...]
In the summer of 1874, Edouard Manet visited the home of Claude Monet in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil, and, as Ross King recounts, he began painting The Monet Family [...]
On what should be the happiest day of his life — the day of his marriage to Angela Carella — the shy and affable Tommy Giordano is the target of [...]
Ten or twelve years ago, here in Chicago, I was on an archdiocesan committee and was duly invited to an afternoon Christmas reception at the Cardinal’s mansion. There was a [...]
In his eighties, Elmore Leonard apparently decided to write whatever he felt like writing. His last six books, published between 2005 and his death in 2013 at 87, were pretty [...]
Everyone, I suppose, has a sense of the what-if of history. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to Ford’s Theater that night and had avoided assassination? What if I had [...]
A half a century ago, as a new political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Dick Simpson won election to the Chicago City Council for the [...]
In his poem “The Hourglass. The Pebble. The Throne of God,” Faisal Mohyuddin ponders “the lightless language of elegy.” His father is dead, and he is grieving. And he wonders [...]
The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City is Kevin Baker’s love letter to the city and the sport and the way they have intertwined for [...]
