In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I’ve got an essay about how more and more novelists are selling the rights to their work to cable networks — and in many cases, even helping adapt that work, as well. Since many of the projects I mentioned remain in the pilot stage (and since the odds that a pilot makes it to air remain terrible), it was tough to get interviews. But I did talk at length with Jonathan Ames, a novelist who’s already adapted his work into a show, Bored to Death, that just finished its third season. Ames made for a great interview — a metaphor machine who balanced deep knowledge with deep-ish pessimism. Below are some interesting quotations I couldn’t fit into the essay.”

On a TV show’s financial benefits: “I got paid much more for the show’s pilot script, which took me six days to write, than I’d ever gotten for any of my novels. The economy of scale is just absurd.”

On a TV show’s collaboration: “HBO was very kind to me — they gave me a learner’s permit. . . . I don’t have much time to sit on a script before I turn it over to other people. It’s a very vulnerable moment. It forces you to be imperfect in front of other people. I need all these people to be, in a sense, editors. Sometimes it’s difficult. But most of the time everyone makes it better.”

On the value of TV versus literature: ”In all the media, my goal is to entertain and amuse — to, for a moment, give someone some relief, perhaps, and to make someone feel less alone. . . . There are certain things I smuggle into the show,  things that you might not find in a typical comedy. I want there to be some gravitas, some sorrow and despair — for a moment, it’s not clearly just a joke, and that feels more in the realm of what I can do in my novels and my nonfiction. But prose makes it much easier to toggle back and forth from lightness and darkness.”

On returning to writing: “Over the course of writing the show, I’ve written a handful of essays. I’ve kept my hand in prose. But I’d like to return to books, if I’m lucky enough to be able to. I can imagine a future critic saying, ‘Ames has clearly been writing for TV.’”

In yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, I’ve got a review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s terrific new book. It collects a bunch of Sullivan’s magazine pieces (hence its title, Pulphead), and pretty much all of them, whether a review or a profile or a topical feature, need and deserve the essay- prefix. The writing and thinking are that good.

Oh, here’s a fascinating snippet from from an interview Sullivan did where he talks about his nonfiction persona:

One aspect of coming out of the magazine world is that fact-checking is always there, hovering, waiting to take away your favorite sentences. But your “self” they don’t get to touch, they don’t get to mess with. That’s your fiefdom. So I like to take that as a liberty, and I try to run with it. That’s what you mean by persona.I never feel like the “I” that’s speaking in a piece of mine has any real duty to sync up with whatever Me is on a given day, in terms of sensibility. If I can create an entity on the page, a being with a voice, who’s able to look at things in a way that gets me closer to what’s true about them, then I embrace him, even if he ends up saying things I don’t say. You can’t do it with other people, of course. If you didn’t actually say the heat was miserable when we were riding the bus together, I can’t quote you as saying that in my piece. But the creature who writes under my byline gets to feel hot and miserable and tell you about it, and the fact-checkers have no way to check it, except to verify that it was 98 degrees in El Paso that day.I’m saying it’s one thing we get as nonfiction writers. You know, fiction writers get a lot. They can do anything. We can’t do that much, but we can play with masks, and they can’t take that away.

In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I’ve got an essay on the short and inglorious history of the American Book Awards. Actually, it’s also a history of the short and inglorious rebranding of the National Book Awards, for the two were one in the same: in the 1980s, the publishing industry tried to turn its awards into a media-friendly Oscars for books, with predictably disastrous results. My essay details many of those disasters. But I came out of this pretty sympathetic to the publishers’ goals — or at least more sympathetic to them than to the way the National Book Awards are currently handled.

Since authors (and especially literary authors) were the ones who fouled things up for the American Book Awards (or the TABAs, as they were called), it seems only fair to spend some time quoting the authors who did make it to the first ceremony. TABA winners didn’t give speeches — this was one of several admittedly baffling choices by the event’s organizers — but co-hosts William F. Buckley and John Chancellor, along with a number of celebrity presenters, indulged in some painfully scripted banter. And thanks to the Hoover Institution’s archive of Buckley’s Firing Line (the only TV coverage the Awards got was a rebroadcast on this show), you can read the Awards’ full transcript here.

• Erica Jong, presenting the first novel award: “It was said by some 19th century wag that a publisher would rather see a burglar in his office than a poet. This istrue, alas, of first novelists. The world never needs another first novelist. Every first novel is the triumph of hope over despair, a desperate leap in the dark.”
• John Towland, presenting the history (hardcover) award: “And the TABA award goes to Henry Kissinger. (applause) And now the nominees for History Paperback.” (Actually, Kissinger got lustily booed by the 1600 or so in attendance.)
• Lauren Baccall, presenting the biography award: “I think I might die right here, I’m so nervous. I have really no jokes at all to tell, except that I can only say that the fact that I’m even included in the evening is quite sufficient for me, and that anyone should call me an author is more than I ever thought would happen to me in my life.” (Bacall won the autobiography [hardcover] award — the closest the TABAs got to the rampant commercialism predicted by the literary community.)
• Buckley, presenting presenter Isaac Asimov: “The award for science will be given by Issac Asimov, whose own achievements make him a legitimate object of scientific curiosity.”

Asimov, who appeared to be more comfortable with the award show format than the other author-presenters, shared a good-natured account of his first publication. (“It was on October 21st, 1938 — 41years, six months and 10 days ago, which will probably strike you dumb with amazement in view of the incredibly youthful appearanceI present.”) But Buckley got the best line of the night — an ad lib after his Stained Glass won best mystery (paperback). “I’m pleased,” he quipped, “by this documentary evidence of the incorruptibility of the [Awards].”

In Sunday’s Boston Globe, in the Ideas section, I’ve got a profile of Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt. In his new book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Greenblatt writes about the fifteenth century’s rediscovery of Lucretius and his poem On the Nature of Things. Given Greenblatt’s subtitle, it’s no surprise that the book continues his push into the world of popular writing, a push that started with his Will in the World.

Actually, Greenblatt’s been writing reviews for The New Republic and op eds for The New York Times since the 1980s; nothing about his career is easy to summarize or diagnose. Still, writing a Shakespeare biography for Norton seems far different than writing an academic book for the University of Chicago Press. I asked Greenblatt about this (and N.B. that none of the quotations in this post made the profile — Greenblatt’s a compulsively quotable guy). “For me, there isn’t a big gap between the two,” he said about academic and popular writing. “It wasn’t like I was deciding to write detective fiction.”

After doing two interviews with Greenblatt, and reading or re-reading many of his books and essays, I’d say this is one of his defining traits: a weird inability to admit that anything he’s ever done was intentional, programmatic, or calculated. When I asked him about the genesis of New Historicism, for example, he said, “We weren’t a group of people who thought we were going to plot the transformation of the field.” Yet Greenblatt transformed his field — and not enough people point this out — through some very deliberate and unglamorous channels: he edited collections of academic essays; he co-founded a journal and book series; and he conjured up not only broad theoretical concepts, but also specific close-readings (of Marlowe, Spenser, and many, many more) that still occupy specialists in those fields.

So, Greenblatt’s The Swerve highlights his transformation from highly specialized academic to . . . literary journalist? (The Swerve doesn’t have much original scholarship, so far as I [or a scolding Michael Dirda] can tell. Unlike Dirda, though, I think it’s a good book; name me a literary journalist who could pull off as many fun and learned tangents as Greenblatt does in his book.) But The Swerve highlights another transformation for Greenblatt, and it’s the one that drives my profile: How did the scholar who argued that not even Shakespeare could escape the limits of his culture end up writing a book whose subtitle claims that, thanks to one book and one author, The World Became Modern?

It was very, very hard to get Greenblatt to address this. At one point I rather desperately read him the passage from Renaissance Self-Fashioning that comes up in my profile, then asked what his 1980 self would think of his 2011 book. “I think he’d like it,” Greenblatt replied. (He’s also compulsively sly.) Still, after some prodding, he admitted that “I was always slightly less Foucauldian than I sounded. I’m a little more optimistic now.”

Greenblatt remained uneasy about his publisher-provided subtitle. “I’m skeptical about any straight-forward teleology,” he said, like any good scholar. Still, he took literary scholars to task for their retreat from the public sphere. “Our work is important. But something about how that work is presented is self-diminishing, self-defeating.” Greenblatt added: “Why do we spend our lives on this? Why is it exciting? Why is it fun? Is it really just ideological demysticifcation? That’s fine, but there can’t be a full diet of that.”

One recommender in that 1990 issue was former First Lady Nancy Reagan. She spoke highly of two books by Rosamund Pincher (The Shell Seekers and September), one book by Mark Twain (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) — and one book each by Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Here, from the Spectator‘s archives, is Nancy’s rationale on those last two:

An American Life, by Ronald Reagan. The fascinating story of a young boy from Dixon, Illinois, who worked for a construction company as an 11-12 year old for 25 cents an hour; at fifteen he became a lifeguard to help work his way through college; in college he worked to pay his way, and afterwards finally landed a job as a sports announcer in Iowa. He then became a star in movies, the Governor of California for eight years, and finally President of the United States for eight years. Incredible story.

My Turn, by Nancy Reagan. An honest book answering all the charges that had been made against her for eight years and she didn’t feel she could answer at the time; a picture of what life was like at the White House and her relationship with her husband.

The New Republic‘s just put out a special 9/11 issue, and I’ve got a feature in it on the long struggle to build the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I don’t have a lot more to say about Shanksville, but I would like to write a bit about the Johnstown Flood National Memorial. Like the Flight 93 memorial, the Johnstown memorial sits in rural Pennsylvania and is operated by the National Park Service. Unlike the Flight 93 memorial, though, the Johnstown memorial commemorates something that happened more than a century ago. I visited Johnstown on my drive back from Shanksville; it helped me think, however approximately, about the way time inflects national tragedy.

It also helped me think about David McCullough. Before we get to him, though, let’s talk about the building of the Johnstown Flood National Memorial. In 1964, a Pennsylvania congressman pushed through a bill — well, he championed a bill; it was unanimously approved — that allocated $2 million to build two Pennsylvania memorials, one for the Allegheny Portage Railroad, the other for Johnstown Flood.

The Flood had provided the nineteenth century with its second biggest scandal, after Lincoln’s assassination. It all started at the  South Fork Dam, which backed up the Conemaugh River and created the  Conemaugh Lake. Next to the Lake sat the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, where the East Coast’s elite would come to, well, fish and hunt. One thing they didn’t do was worry about the fact that the South Fork Dam kept springing leaks. In 1889, though, it failed completely. Nearly 5 billion gallons of water spilled down through the mountains and into the steel mill city of Johnstown. Early telegram reports suggested that the Johnstown Flood had caused 10,000 casualties. The final count was bad enough: 2,200.

*  *  *

Around the same time Congress was taking an interest in the Johnstown Flood — they put the National Memorial ten miles above Johnstown, next to what was left of the South Fork Dam — David McCullough was taking an interest in it, too. It was an odd choice for both of them since memory of the Flood had largely faded. In fact, the only scholarship on the subject was a 1940 dissertation, which McCullough ended up thanking in the introduction to The Johnstown Flood, his first book.

In a Paris Review interview, McCullough created a typically charming scene of the book’s origins:

When we were little kids, we used to make a lake of gravy in our mashed potatoes; then we’d take a fork, break the potatoes, and say, The Johnstown flood! — with no idea why in the world we did it. That was about all I knew about it until I saw the photographs of the flood, quite by chance at the Library of Congress. . . .  I wrote The Johnstown Flood at night after work. I would come home, we’d have dinner, put the kids to bed, and then at about nine I would go to a little room upstairs, close the door, and start working. I tried to write not four but two pages every night. Our oldest daughter remembers going to sleep to the sound of the typewriter.

Reviewers loved the book when it came out in 1968. They praised McCulloguh’s research and his writing — especially since he’d chosen an event where, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “no neat narrative line, centered on a dominant protagonist and with all ends neatly tucked in, is possible.”

A “neat narrative line”? A “dominant protagonist”? Today, that feels like a pretty fair description of McCullough’s historical method. Or at least of a prominent critique of that method, where Harry Truman or John Adams simultaneously shape and float above history.

*  *  *

It’s no surprise that McCullough’s Johnstown book didn’t sell like his later presidential ones. Still, it helped bring the Flood back to people’s attention. In 1986, as Johnstown was gearing up for the Flood’s centennial, the director of the city’s new Johnstown Flood Museum — not to be confused with the separate Johnstown National Memorial — could tell the A.P. with a relatively straight face that “it’s part of American folklore. Everyone’s heard of it.”

The government poured another $5 million into the memorial for renovations — by now, the key congressman was John Murtha — and a group of locals formed the Johnstown Flood Centennial Committee. The Committee made an ambitious schedule of more than 100 events. Still, everyone wanted to focus on the historical heroism of Johnstown’s everyday citizens. “We don’t want to build an amusement park,” another city booster told National Geographic.

*  *  *

Those sentiments echoed the ones I heard from anyone associated with the Flight 93 National Memorial. After spending three days there, I started the eight-hour drive back to Connecticut. It was a different route than the one I came on, a route that let me see the Johnstown Flood National Memorial. The memorial’s visitors’ center — the center was one of the things added for the Flood’s centennial — still stocked copies of McCullough’s book. When I stopped by, though, it lacked very many visitors. Thanks to strip mining, the Conemaugh River had turned the color of tomato juice.

Still, the combination of the visitors’ center, which had several wonderful displays drawn from McCullough’s research, and the geographical features — all that remained of the South Fork Dam were its two enormous sloping banks — made the memorial quite powerful. It left me wanting to visit the Johnstown Flood Museum, but I didn’t because I had to keep driving. Honestly, I hadn’t planned on being so moved by the experience.

Let’s run down Taylor’s syllabus, which is pretty easy if you’ve got a working knowledge of the nonfiction dustbins at your local Barnes & Noble. In addition to Laurence Leamer’s The Kennedy Women, she’s reading David McCullough’s John Adams and his 1776 (or maybe Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers) and — regrettably — Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. The Ellis Island title’s harder to identify: I’m guessing it’s not David R. Roediger’s Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White. Maybe Kate Kerrigan’s new historical novel Ellis Island? Maybe the oral history Island of Hope, Island of Tears? Maybe Vincent Cannato’s American Passage?

Anyway, it’s nice to see someone so young and so famous reading all this semi-serious nonfiction, even if Swift seems to base her choices on the last few years’ most popular Fathers’ Day gifts. A friend quipped that Swift surely bought Mark Twain’s Autobiography last year. But here’s the crazy thing: while a copy of Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time must be floating around her tour bus, Swift was born eighteen months after its publication.

Bonus link: this interesting 1988 New York feature, pegged to the publication of Hawking’s book, on “the great unread books of our time.”

I’m a little late in linking to this, but I wrote another story for the Boston Globe‘s Ideas section — this one on the crazy, opulent history of deluxe presidential memoirs, books that typically come with autographs, artificially limited print runs, and price tags as high as $1,500.

Along with my text, you’ll find some great photos from Jim Hier, a Portland man who works in finance — and who owns more than 400 different volumes autographed by presidents. Hier filled me in on the rise of presidential book collecting, and, while there wasn’t room for that in the story, I’ll sketch it here.

Nineteenth-century autograph hounds lusted after George Washington’s signature, so there is a history here. Still, for most of that history, collectors didn’t care about an autograph’s context. Hier remembers that, for a long time, books with presidential autographs actually came cheaper than letters or random squibs. “A lot of dealers looked at books as a bit of a nuisance,” he told me. “They were bulky, heavy, and hard to transport. One time, I got Eisenhower’s two-volume set at the end of a show for a big discount, just because the dealer just didn’t want to pack it home.”

Two things changed this. First, in 1982, Stephen Koschal published a book titled Collecting Books and Pamphlets Signed by the Presidents of the United States. It helped focus and drive the interests of collectors like Hier. The second change was the Internet, and websites like eBay and AbeBooks helped Koschal’s readers connect with each other. Rare and autographed presidential books still make up a small part of the book collecting universe, but Hier says interest (and prices) have grown substantially. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hier found new items all the time. “Now, I’m lucky if I can add one or two good books a year.”

That’s partly because Hier already owns so many amazing titles. (In addition to the mass produced books I talk about in my story, Hier owns unique books like a copy of Benjamin Henry Harrison’s This Country of Ours that the president signed for his wife.) But that’s also because, today, Hier has plenty of company.

In Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, I’ve got a review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. This novel isn’t exactly hurting for attention, but I do try to make a couple of fresh points: first, that Wallace has always been a novelist of ideas; second, and contrary to what most reviewers have been claiming, The Pale King isn’t really “about boredom,” though the idea of boredom does let Wallace get at a lot of his bigger concerns.

One thing  every reviewer can agree on is that The Pale King reveals a softer, more reader-friendly side of Wallace. But that was to be expected. Back in 1993, Wallace told an interviewer that he wanted to stop writing sentences that were

a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them.

I’m not sure Infinite Jest lived up to those goals, despite its many pleasures and successes. In that novel’s aftermath, though, Wallace promised to try harder. “For somebody who comes out of a more theoretical avant-garde tradition,” he told another interviewer, ”I think the aging process is a thawing process.” Wallace clearly fits in that tradition; when The Pale King‘s ”Author’s Foreword” cheekily started on page 65, I thought of Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants, which starts its dedication to Cervantes on page 76. More to the point, Wallace clearly went through that “thawing process,” which means The Pale King now stands as the best introduction to his work and worldview. Think of it as a novel-in-short stories — one of those books where characters and narratives and ideas interact and intensify without building into a larger whole.

Two points about Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System. Several reviewers, along with Michael Pietsch in his “Editor’s Note,” have pointed out that this book ends mid-plot and even mid-sentence — and thus reinforces the idea that The Pale King‘s unfinished state shouldn’t hold anyone back. I agree with the sentiment, but want to note that Wallace later regretted The Broom of the System‘s cutesy non-ending. His agent, Bonnie Nadell, then his editor, Gerald Howard, had begged him to come up with a new ending to satisfy the readers who finished this demanding book. But Wallace refused. ”It was written very quickly, rewritten sloppily,” he admitted in a later interview. “Sound editorial suggestions were met with a seventeen-page letter about literary theory that was really a not-very interesting way — really a way for me to avoid doing hard work.”

The other thing to say about The Broom of the System is that, already, Wallace was working on his idea-driven method. In another early interview — one that’s rarely mentioned, but available here as a .pdf — he said that ”I didn’t start writing fiction until I was twenty-one, and at the beginning we all have to write our requisite amounts of shit, and my shit was basically disguised essays. They were like really bad Ayn Rand or something.” The transition from these two points to The Pale King — that’s why the Dostoevsky quotation at the end of my review felt so autobiographical.

I’ll end with a Franzen / Wallace comparison, in honor of the former’s New Yorker essay on the latter. (You might say that Franzen did some thawing between The Corrections and Freedom — too much thawing, in fact.) I think it’s well worth rereading Wallace’s Kenyon commencement speech alongside The Pale King in the same way people read Franzen’s famous “Perchance to Dream” essay alongside The Corrections. In both cases, you’ve got a nonfiction manifesto that correlates to the ideas behind the fiction. Wallace’s ideas may seem more social, and Franzen’s more aesthetic, but there’s a ton of both in both. The friendly rivalry between those two fascinates me. I can never decide if Wallace is Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

In this week’s Boston Globe — and exactly 150 years after the start of the Civil War — I’ve got a feature on the war’s impact on American literature. For pretty much all of those 150 years, people have been wondering why the Civil War didn’t produce any great contemporary works of literature. What gets overlooked in this is the number of great authors who did live and write during the 1860s: Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and more. The history of American war writing stretches back at least to 1638, when Captain John Underhill chronicled the Pequot War in Newes from America. I learned that in Cynthia Wachtell’s excellent War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature. Still, the focus of my feature is Randall Fuller’s From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature. Taken together, Wachtell and Fuller’s books suggest that, while the Civil War lacked a true literary masterpiece, it did clear the way for the antiwar writing we recognize today.

I want to expand on two things I didn’t have space for in my feature. First, the role of photography in the Civil War. Plenty of scholars have argued that this newish medium — notably through Mathew Brady’s 1862 gallery of Antietam — went a long way toward making the Civil War the grisly, realistic, and transformative experience it so surely was. But Fuller connects this idea to literary authors. While in Washington reporting “Chiefly About War-Matters” (the essay remains a great read and can be found here), Hawthorne sat for two visual portraits. The first (pictured above right) was a painting by none other than Emanuel Leutze, who remains best known for his Washington Crossing the Delaware and Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. The second (above left) was a photograph by Alexander Gardner, the Brady photographer who supplied many of the Antietam shots.

The contrast between these two portraits gets at how transitional this moment was for visual culture.  But it also gets at the difference between painting and photography — a difference that played out in the war coverage, where, for the first time, people could choose between the sanitized, sentimental drawings in publications like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and photographs. When the New York Times wrote up Brady’s gallery, it praised its “terrible reality and earnestness.” “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets,” the Times continued, “he has done something very like it.” Hawthorne looks a lot better with the help of Leutze. The same was true of the Civil War’s violence.

Second topic: Walt Whitman’s taste in opera. At the start of my feature, I tell the story of Whitman walking out of the opera on the night of April 13, only to learn about the attack on Fort Sumter. Scholars love this anecdote for all the obvious reasons, but they disagree on the show Whitman attended. Most say it was Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera. But a few, like Mark Caldwell, in his cultural history New York Night: The Mystique and Its History, say it was Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix. Curious, and wanting to get this right, I emailed Professor Caldwell to ask him why he went with Donizetti.  In a gracious and detailed reply, he explained that according to the listings Verdi was a matinée on April 13, while Donizetti was an evening performance on both April 12 and April 13.

Now, the news about Fort Sumter arrived in New York via telegraph on the afternoon of the 12th. This means neither show matches up perfectly with Whitman’s own account of hearing the news — an account he wrote more than a decade after the fact. Professor Caldwell told me he placed more weight on Whitman’s description of reading the news at night than on his specific mention of the 13th of April. That makes perfectly good sense. I did some more reading around — I didn’t see anyone air this debate out fully, though someone surely has — and decided to put more weight on the documented lag between telegraphs and newspapers and on Whitman’s ability to kill a few hours in Brooklyn. I hope that makes sense, too. Either way, Whitman had seen more than 20 opera performances before this one. He would have been happy with Verdi or Donizetti or both.