Nicholas Delbanco

One of the country's leading literary scholars explores the fascinating question of why some people's creative talents flourish with age while others' fade.

In this new contribution to Yale University Press's Why X Matters series, a distinguished writer and scholar tackles central questions of the discipline of writing. Drawing on his own experience with mentors such as John Updike, John Gardner, and James Baldwin, and in turn having taught such rising stars as Jesmyn Ward, Delbanco looks in particular at questions of influence and the contradictory, simultaneous impulses toward imitation and originality....

An "inquiry into the nature of artistic prodigies who did their major work at an early age ... Nicholas Delbanco gives us a triptych of ... portraits: the American writer Stephen Crane (immortalized by The red badge of courage); British artist Dora Carrington (called 'the most neglected serious painter of her time'); and the legendary composer George Gershwin (Rhapsody in blue, Porgy and Bess)"--Page 4 of cover.

"In 1917, after the entry of America into World War I, E. E. Cummings, a recent graduate of Harvard College, volunteered to serve on an ambulance corps in France. Arrived in Paris with a new friend, William Slater Brown, the two young men set about living it up in the big city before heading off to their assignment. Once in the field, they wrote irreverent letters about their experiences which attracted the attention of the censors and ultimately...