This copy of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King somehow made its way from the library of Maria Assumpta College, in London, to a secondhand shop in Carmel, California. Tracing the book’s history led to stories as strange and wonderful as the novel itself. Maria Assumpta College was a Catholic…

My father was training to fight a war, but his real battle was with himself [Originally appeared in the Winter 2019 American Scholar.] My father, Ron Zobenica, had been a fighter pilot in the Marines, and his stories were filled with place names that, through repetition and association, took on…

In the late 1980s, as the air slowly went out of the Cold War, and as Francis Fukuyama prepared to ask outright whether History had reached its end, I found myself sampling the Russian masters, the most contemporary of whom (i.e., the one with the most modern sensibility) seemed to…

When I was reading Madame Bovary (for the first and thus far only time, in my early forties), I met up with a friend and former colleague for lunch in Cambridge. …

In February 1942, in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor two months prior, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of all Japanese Americans from the west coast of the United States. Among the forced evacuees was John Okada, then a freshman at the…

I was thirteen or fourteen years old when my good friend and fellow war buff, B. Bunny, arrived at my house carrying a first edition of cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s Up Front (1945), which B. Bunny had checked out from the public library in Coleraine, Minnesota. Since B. Bunny was going…

This inscription in my copy of Paul Bowles’s 1949 The Sheltering Sky is priceless: “Dec. 1998 I don’t know what kept me reading — strange, strange book.”

I have fond memories of reading John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy — Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990) — particularly the last two installments. But ever since David Foster Wallace, in a 1997 review, quoted a female friend saying that John Updike…

This one is a bit of a mystery. That date, presumably, is either the owner’s birth date or the date of the inscription itself. Since the book is Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd’s dryly fascinating Middletown: A Study in American Culture (1929), I’m guessing that a person old enough…