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“... when he had last reread the novel.WritersI heard, from separate sources, that both Philip Roth and William Styron had pinned up above their desks a famous Flaubert aphorism, which Blake Bailey quotes in his Roth biography: ‘Be orderly and regular in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be wild and original in your work.’ It is a ...”

“... Esquire, part of a work in progress, in which they were easy to recognise. ‘It seemed to me,’ William Styron wrote, ‘an act of willed destruction.’ Even Norman Mailer thought it was ‘not even bold, but rash’. They never had anything to do with him again. He had cut their throats, so to speak. In his correspondence with people in Kansas, the ...”

“... of editors on the look-out. He’s invited to write reviews for the New Yorker, whose editor, William Shawn, was as Jamesian a figure as Lionel Trilling, a mandarin of almost excruciating courtesy and subtle indirection, riddled with phobias. Podhoretz prided himself, as well he might, on being the only young man to write for both Partisan Review and the ...”

“... his precipitous decline year after year. (His neuro-chemistry is not accessible to biography.) William Styron gave up trying to understand his own collapse, which coincided, roughly speaking, with Levi’s last attack: ‘the very number of hypotheses is testimony to the malady’s all but impenetrable mystery.’ Levi’s death is thus both easy and ...”

“... an ad hoc fund that channelled donations from an all-star roster of American authors, including William Styron, Bellow, Alison Lurie and Gore Vidal; even Irving Howe chipped in. It was thanks to Roth’s entrepreneurship that Penguin launched its Writers from the Other Europe series, which introduced (among others) Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, Tadeusz ...”

“... of a physical crisis (appendicitis), which came on at the launch party for a friend’s novel – William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner – were interpreted as somatic manifestations of envy. But although there were gaps in his treatment, he went on seeing Kleinschmidt for five years. Then, in 1967, he discovered that Kleinschmidt had used ...”

“... different from ‘writing’ or ‘novel-making’ – from what ‘entertainers’ like Bellow, Styron or Updike engage in. Karl’s dreary premise is that writers who win popular acclaim are somehow suspect, creations of what he variously calls ‘the media’ and ‘the marketplace’. Modern and Post-Modern literature is often ‘inaccessible and even ...”