An Unsentimental Education: Writers and Chicago

This could have seemed a rather parochial notion, interviewing celebrated alumni of a single university for a locally published volume. In fact, partly because of the remarkable nature of the institution itself, partly because of the extremely distinguished authors involved--and also because of former PW editor McQuade's tactful and probing interviews--the book makes for highly stimulating reading. The University of Chicago, in the postwar decades largely covered here, was an extraordinary place, creating, through the leadership of president Robert Hutchins and a sterling faculty, a standard of intellectual attainment seldom matched in American academia. The 21 writers represented here--Susan Sontag, Kurt Vonnegut, George Steiner, Charles Simic, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Robert Coover, June Jordan, etc.--all pay tribute to the impact the university had on their imaginations, and among them create an almost tangible sense of the kind of intellectual ferment that seems irretrievably lost. Most of the interviews have been edited by McQuade into first-person monologues that read smoothly, yet with the idiosyncrasies of their subjects intact; Bellow and Coover opt instead for Q&A formats. (June)