Life and Art: Essays

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Russo’s (Somebody’s Fool) second essay collection focuses on writing and his life. He has written screenplays for a number of his books, including an HBO miniseries for Empire Falls. Reading about his childhood, youth, and early adulthood, growing up in a Rustbelt town in upstate New York as the son of an often-absent father and an ambitious mother, helps readers understand the source of his books’ settings, their characters, and his (and their) outlooks on life. Thirteen essays (some of which originally appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association) reveal even more of Russo’s background and interests—studying for his Ph.D. in literature at the University of Arizona, teaching English at Colby and other colleges, traveling across the country on book tours, screenwriting and adapting his own work. Russo also writes of his interest in Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim, the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (and one of its stars, Paul Newman), and Townes Van Zandt’s song “Pancho and Lefty.”