“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.”
“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”
“It is a witty pleasure to read a frontier tale where the explorers, the pathfinders, the hunters, the new builders are there, but metaphorically — as gay women!”
“As glam rock waned and disco had yet to wax, punk style provided the perfect cultural jolt, a new kind of 'No!' that brought together fashion, music, press, and politics to tell the world a story England still can't be too eager to bear”
“Kerouac and Mailer have long been literary brothers, even if under each other’s skin. Which one founded the Beat Generation and which one merely found it is just a matter of semantics”
