Scott Donaldson

Seventy-one years ago Ernest Hemingway suffered the shock—or rather the two shocks—of his young life. He came to World War I at 18, fresh from a few months as a cub reporter in Kansas City and only a year out of Oak Park high school. His war d [...]

Asked why he wrote fiction, John Cheever used to answer that it was what he could do best, his craft, his usefulness. But he also wrote, he said, to "make sense of my life." The process was not so private as it sounds, for by attempting to make se [...]