Charles Jackson barely ever wrote a piece of fiction. The vast majority of his output—five novels or collections in the decade beginning 1944, and one final novel fourteen years later (“99 percent of this novel is lubricious trash,” read the Kirkus review)—was thinly disguised fact. His first, and by far his best-known, work was The Lost Weekend; it was essentially his homosexual alcoholic’s diary artfully made fiction. It made headlines for its depiction of alcoholism; the homosexual component got far less attention, likely because of the distorted Freudian fever gripping the nation, in which

On January 4, 1955, William Gaddis sent physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer a letter and a copy of The Recognitions, his 956-page first novel, which would officially be published in March of that year. “You must receive mail of all sorts,” Gaddis wrote, “crank notes and fan letters of every description, but few I should think of half a million words.” Oppenheimer, who oversaw the creation of the atomic bomb as director of the laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico, had delivered a speech for Columbia University’s bicentennial. The address, called “Prospects in the Arts and Sciences,” describes how

Of all the things one can portray in a movie, marriage is surely not the most titillating. It can’t possibly hold a candle to sex or violence—or some lurid combination of the two—and is an equally tough sell against horror, slapstick, sci-fi, romance, or the western. “Embrace happy marriage in real life,” director Frank Capra once remarked, “but keep away from it onscreen.” And yet there have been a great number of films, from the silent era until today, that have defied Capra’s warning and compellingly depicted one of the world’s most enduring institutions. (Capra himself offered a fiendish

Speak, memory: “Nan’s pussy got damp but not soaking wet,” the musician Richard Hell recalls late in his new autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp. “It was slick, like a squeaky rubber duck.” There are many shivery, illicit pleasures in this louche memoir of bygone bands and lost downtown haunts, including the author’s anatomically vivid, clinically surreal descriptions of past conquests. Hell writes of meeting—in a late-’60s poetry class taught by José Garcia Villa—a “sad, hysterical girl with red capillaries on her nose and cheekbones, and large breasts that looked like twin

When a Paris Review interviewer asked Vladimir Nabokov what he liked to do best besides writing novels, the author replied, “Oh, hunting butterflies, of course, and studying them. The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru.”

Nabokov was far from alone in this passion. The particular rapture of butterfly collection and study, the sensuous delight of this most painterly branch of entomology, was commonly voiced by its nineteenth-century adherents, as

T he first inkling of William Styron’s interest in the rebel slave leader Nat Turner, which evolved into the prolix, vision-packed novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), surfaces in a letter to his literary agent in 1952. Styron asked Elizabeth McKee to look out for a copy of The Southampton Insurrection by William S. Drewry (1900). “It’s the only full account I know of the Nat Turner rebellion, and I’d like to read it.”