Vanity Fair's Writers on Writers

This anthology from Vanity Fair magazine, compiled by its editor, Carter, collects the "best pieces about writers from the modern-era magazine—forty-three essays from the past thirty-five years," and the many writings here, by distinguished authors, take a wide-ranging view of their subjects. The figures observed here are often aging, such as Eudora Welty and Reynolds Price, and are profiled by those who have known them for decades or met them in their later years, while others who have passed receive elegiac remembrances. Some, including Jack Kerouac and Truman Capote, are portrayed in decline and deterioration, on a downward trajectory from their literary heights. Individual pieces stand out. One is a literal hunt for a lost archive of Ernest Hemingway's papers in Cuba, while another is Michael Lewis's terrific search to understand Tom Wolfe and his singular contribution to New Journalism. Taken together, each essay tends to focus not deeply on the writer's work but rather on the character of the life lived, with the prose becoming a backdrop to each authors' "writerly self."