Fame & Folly: Essays

In this collection of essays, fiction writer and critic Cynthia Ozick has chosen to take on an important topic for all writers: how the lives and works of authors fit in with the times. It is a task she manages with more than a healthy helping of wryness. As Ozick describes it, the subject of this collection is "famous literary figures in our famously rotten century who have been associated with one sort of folly or another." With that in mind, she offers a wide-ranging set of essays on Isaac Babel; H. G. Wells and Henry James; Anthony Trollope; the American Academy of Arts and Letters' early-century disdain for modernism; and more.