The American writer and literary critic Michael Dirda (b 1948), writes for the Washington Post amongst others. In 1993 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book reviews. HERE is Browsings, his collection of short pieces for the American Scholar that have subsequently been collected into a volume. There is also a very entertaining piece about his book collecting habits HERE.
Below is a small exerpt from a Browsings piece called Books on Books:
These days, The Paris Review has repackaged
its long-running series of conversations with authors, and even made
them available online. I’m glad for this, and yet the original Writers at Work
volumes, especially the first three, possessed a magic all their own.
As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for
insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner,
Colette, Waugh—they were all there. What has stuck with me the most
over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of
revision, of revising and revising again.
Image of Thomas Burke from The Glory That Was Grub Street (HERE)
