Research Catalog

Title

The amateur : an independent life of letters / Wendy Lesser.

Author

Lesser, Wendy.

Publication

New York : Pantheon Books, 1999.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

ix, 274 pages; 20 cm

Summary

• The Amateur is an inquiry into how we discover our passions and how they discover us. In The Amateur Lesser explores some of the choices she has made in pursuit of an old fashioned but indispensable vocation: an independent life of letters.
• She discusses the place - California - in which she grew up; the institutions - Harvard, Cambridge, Berkeley - where she received her formal education; the writers, artists, and performers who deepened her critical understanding; and, finally, the literary journal she founded, The Threepenny Review, which she still edits and publishes out of the Berkeley apartment in which it began nearly twenty years ago.
• Lesser describes both the events in her own life and those she has witnessed on stage, screen, canvas, and paper, noting how both experience and art teach us to observe, to discriminate, and to make sense of one another.

Subjects

• Book reviewing > United States
• Critics > United States > Biography
• Lesser, Wendy
• Periodical editors > United States > Biography

Contents

Overture -- In Washington Square -- Wish Fulfillment -- Vocabulary -- Mr. Jones -- Thinking Back on Harvard -- An American in England -- Consultants -- Strange Meeting -- Report on a Site Visit -- Founding a Magazine -- Drafted -- On Philanthropy -- Out of Academia -- Dance Lessons -- Passionate Witness -- Portrait of a Ballerina -- A Night at the Opera -- Ralph -- The Conversion -- Chasing Daldry -- Thom Gunn -- Elegy for Mario Savio -- My Imaginary New York Life.

ISBN

0375404023

LCCN

98026157

OCLC

• 39299012
• ocm39299012

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries