In 1976, the culture critic asked, “What is it that Americans share?”

“At his best, Joseph Campbell was merely one of the greatest popu­lar writers on mythology who ever lived.”

“Ten years after the American moon landing — 20 since Sputnik 1 — astronauts and space-race lore have receded enough into the past to warrant rethinking. Tom Wolfe tells the early space story as if it were myth, and it is.”

“When the iron door was opened, sounds peculiar to jails and prisons poured into my ears — the screams, the metallic clanging, officers’ keys clinking. Some of the women noticed me and smiled warmly or threw up their fists in gestures of solidarity”

“In so many ways and to so many people, Hughes was 'the Negro,' or at least 'Negro literature,' its public face, its spoken voice and cock­tail-party embodiment as well as the source of its printed texts.”

“Hughes was the first black American writer many of us ever read... and his career re­mains an inspiring model for black writers determined to make a living solely from their work.”

“Do you know Herbert Huncke?” Allen Ginsberg asked. “He’s the oldest living junkie in New York, and an old sidekick of Burroughs and Kerouac”

“He brought his readers on a trip to a landscape that seemed not only made for them but made by them, a peculiarly visceral American place that practically none of them would ever really see.”

“Nabokov's reputation as a novelist, scholar, translator, and lepidop­terist is unassailable, but not many people know that he was also a great teacher (on the other hand, those of us who took his courses in the early '50s didn't have the vaguest notion he'd written a single word of fiction)”

“During the ’50s, when little or nothing honest about gay male and lesbian lives was available culturally, how could a truth teller grab a niche? Not through high culture”