Description
About the Author
ROBERT BOYERS, born in 1942, founded the American quarterly magazine Salmagundi in 1965 and continues to edit the journal, to teach at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York and to direct The New York State Summer Writers Institute. Boyers is the author of hundreds of periodical essays and of a dozen books, most recently a widely discussed 2019 book on the “culture wars” entitled The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy & The Hunt for Political Heresies. His other books include two works on politics and the novel, a volume of short stories and a 2015 book on The Fate of Ideas. In 2009 he edited and wrote the introduction for George Steiner at The New Yorker, a book that has been published in more than twenty languages.
Reviews
“Robert Boyers has made in this sometimes brutally honest but always loving memoir of his difficult friends a moving contribution to the history of our intellectual culture. Boyers and his wife, the poet Peg Boyers, were for decades deeply involved with Sontag and Steiner’s work, no less when they disagreed with them. What Sontag called ‘the dramaturgy of ideas’ and ‘the dramaturgy of feeling’ flow together in Boyers’ portrait of brilliance and vulnerabilities, and the life of the mind as human passion. He recalls everything there is to respect about them and to treasure in their legacies.” – Darryl Pinckney
“Robert Boyers has managed not only to draw extraordinarily vivid portrayals of two writer-critics, but also to add a third portrait: that of the author himself, who plays a sort of wry pragmatic Sancho Panza role to these two disputatious Knights of Intellect. A thrillingly generous book, it deserves to be seen as following in the grand tradition of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Sainte-Beuve’s biographical sketches and Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences.” — Phillip Lopate
“This superb book takes us back to the last moments of the golden age of American letters. Despite inescapable faults and foibles of these figures, Robert Boyers lays bare with wisdom and wit their absolute commitment to the life of the mind and majesty of the intellectual vocation. His own profound capacity for friendship animates and elevates this fascinating book.” — Cornel West
“Robert Boyers possesses a rare genius for friendship, and above all his book is a testament to friendship as a way of life, and as the medium in which thinking thrives. I loved it.” — Garth Greenwell
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