cover image PUBLISHED & PERISHED: Memoria, Eulogies & Remembrances of American Writers

PUBLISHED & PERISHED: Memoria, Eulogies & Remembrances of American Writers

, . . Godine, $26.95 (240pp) ISBN 978-1-56792-218-9

A volume of essays in which famous writers memorialize their dead colleagues could have been horribly dull: after all, the high-flown metaphors and whitewashed remembrances of the eulogy form would hardly seem to make compelling reading. Yet Gilbar and Stewart have circumvented the potential monotony of this genre by unearthing a wonderfully diverse set of essays that offer a variety of unique perspectives on life, death and the immortality that all writers crave. For starters, the table of contents provides fans of literature with a delicious who's who of American letters: Thoreau by Emerson, Twain by Howells, Lardner by Fitzgerald, Wright by Baldwin, Sandburg by Saroyan, Cheever by Bellow. Add to the mix that each writer approaches his or her subject from a specific emotional standpoint—as a friend, a lover, an enemy, a student, a fan—lending each essay a distinct poignancy, while at the same time adding to the larger theme running through the book: the complicated, emotional and immortal relationship that exists between writers and their readers. Particularly noteworthy are Oliver Wendell Holmes's solemn, grandiloquently metaphoric appreciation of Nathaniel Hawthorne; Willa Cather's charming, anecdotal account of her chance meeting with a callow Stephen Crane; and Toni Morrison's reverent, poetic lament over the loss of James Baldwin. Although there are the occasional duds here—essays too formal and abstract to adequately convey a true sense of the dead—the majority of these writings movingly affirm the eternal spirit of these authors, their works and the readers who live on from generation to generation. (Nov. 15)