As the year in which George Orwell’s masterpiece was set approached, a wave of critics, eulogists, and scavengers emerged. 1984 is a work hard to attack directly, though that has been done, and some who profess to be praising Orwell’s work would really prefer to bury it. E. L. Doctorow, in a recent Playboy article, provides a specimen of the latter. So...

Nora Ephron is a genius at turning her personal life in to cash. In her essays, which she has collected in previous vol­umes, she has taken us to events and places including her college reunion, therapy group, and her amniocentesis. However, take away her individualized experiences and the essays become identical to those of every other liberal writer: she is...

For most modem Westerners, the word idolatry conjures images of dis­tant lands or times: saffron-clothed Oriental monks prostrate before golden Buddhas, ancient Aztec priests plunging their daggers into helpless virgins atop monumental temples, or iniquitous Israelites cavorting before Aaron’s golden calf in the Sinai. Certainly, the cultural dominance of Judea-Christianity has made these types of blatant and un­sophisticated idolatry rare...

The South has an enduring status as a region somewhat separate from the main thrust of American life. The tension be­tween agrarian and commercial impulses in American society, epitomized by the yeomen idealized in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and the striving industrial class whose rise was promoted by Alexander Hamilton’s Re­ports as Secretary of the Treasury, had its...

Lately our national leaders seem to have taken it into their heads that their first obligation upon taking office is to get ready to write their memoirs once they leave it. We’ve had Nixon’s and Johnson’s, Kissinger’s massive volumes, and now Vance’s and Brzezinski’s. Jimmy Carter reportedly has a high-tech memoir in preparation, the entire record of his eccentric administration...

What do Groucho Marx, Lech Walesa, Oriana Fallaci, Johnny Carson, Ted Patrick, G. Gordon Liddy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Fonda, his daughter Jane and son-in-law Tom Hayden, Ed Koch, Roman Polanski, Robert Redford, Salvador Dali, William Shockley, Robert Garwood, Ayn Rand, Ian Fleming, Roane Arledge, Robert Shelton, Alex Haley, Henry Miller, Arnold Toynbee, and William F. Buckley, Jr. all have in...

The forecasters have had a bad year. That uncertainty of acuity that charac­terizes those who predict the weather has long been obvious; the predictions of their brethren in the field of econom­ics are similarly infamous. President Reagan’s economic policies were sup­posed to make 1983 a disaster, but the economy is rapidly improving. The only worrisome aspect of the recovery is...

Years before many Americans noticed him, France’s socialist president made a career while provoking contrary senti­ments. He evidently prefers not to be understood. Conservatives governing America must nonetheless decide what to think about a ruler who supports us and opposes the Soviets in Europe while opposing us and supporting Soviet allies in Latin America. This biography can contribute to that effort,...

As a distinctively modern genre, the short story does not require any earth-straddling heroes, merely ordinary people. It does require, however, an author with extraordinary perception of how small events may reveal a spark of the transcendent–or a shadow of the fiendish–even in dry­ goods clerks or grade-school teachers. Maxine Steinman was such a rare writer. In the stories posthumously collected...

A cultural paradigm should be a posi­tive one, an object that, through its very being, encourages emulation. If that model is a man or woman, a hero or a heroine, then that person should, at all visible times and in all apparent ways (i.e., let’s acknowledge privacy as a per­sonal need, People and National En­quirer to the contrary), be the type...

Jorge Luis Borges once ob­served that ideally–given an omniscient observer–”an inde­finite, and almost infinite” num­ber of biographies could be writ­ten about a man, including “the genealogical biography, the economic biography, the psychiat­ric biography, the surgical biog­raphy, the topographical biog­raphy.” These and other types ( e.g., the sexual biography) de­picting insignificant personalities roll from the presses at an in­ exorable rate, multiplying...

In 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner created a landmark in American historiography by articulating his thesis that the frontier ex­perience had produced “the forces dominating American character.” Especially during the last 20 years, many historians have challenged the validity of Turner’s views, arguing that European culture remained the primary influence upon American government and society. None­theless, movies,...

Posthumously, William Faulkner has achieved a celebrity that, if we take him at his word, he despised and eschewed, but which seems inseparable from modem commercial culture. Every second man in the street, who can’t remember who is currently Vice-President, recognizes Faulkner’s name as that of a famous writer. Every lumpen intellectual who once read The Sound and the Fury...