I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, and heartily recommend, the book I just finished reading: Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott, by Odell Shepard. Published in 1937 in Boston by Little, Brown and Company, this masterpiece of biography was the publisher’s Centenary Prize Book, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1938. It’s easily one of the best biographies I’ve read, and I’ve read many. Shepard’s work, […]
That so many of us are eager and willing to embrace ignorance is not a new thing. Willful ignorance is what gives power to the powerful; makes us vulnerable to injustices of every kind; and enslaves us in a narrow world of our own unwitting creation. That letting others do our thinking for us is easier, cannot be further from the truth; we need only look at the results. It […]
Again, in preserving some of these older pieces, I find I must be willing to overlook what I feel are certain obvious weaknesses. In the present case, I do it for memory’s sake, and for its biographical and autobiographical value. My friend’s death when we were eighteen, the time that led up to it and which immediately followed, I count as one of the saddest, most fortunate experiences of my […]
William Michaelian 