Tag: modern reader
The Cost of Making ‘The Iliad’ Modern
Early in Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, perhaps the greatest novel about an American bureaucracy, the narrator describes a most unbureaucratic figure, a Maine fisherman named Snowman Dyer who died in 1870 in his sister’s home. Dyer once “bartered five lobsters for a small Greek tome that belonged to a classics scholar at Harvard.” The English translation, which was printed between the lines of Greek, so intrigued Dyer that he decided to read the original. Having no teacher other than
The Invention of Objectivity – The Atlantic
When Carr Van Anda joined The New York Times as its managing editor on February 14, 1904, the temperature inside the office dropped a few degrees—or so it felt.
Van Anda, age 39, was a chilly newsroom presence, a formal man who wore rimless glasses and a stickpin through his starched collars. Times reporters lived in fear of his chastening glare. They called it the “death ray.”
The most famous stories about “V.A.,” as he was known around the