|
|
|
|
|
|
Tom Wolfe
America's Master Novelist
In high school, there was a course in the sophomore year of high school in rhetoric. And I'm talking about rigorous rhetoric: the use of figures of speech, figura sententiae, and tropes, and all these technical names, and training in the three or four ways that you can arrange a paragraph. I don't think any of this happens any longer. Parsing sentences, which is a fading art. These diagrams of sentences, so you find out how all the different parts fit together. This was amazingly good training. Then in college, I went to Washington and Lee in Virginia, there was a young professor -- it never dawned on me 'til later that he was probably only four or five years older than me -- who had come to Washington and Lee from the American Studies program at Yale. That's where he had gotten his doctorate. And this course was so exciting that I was determined to do what he had done, which was to go to Yale in American Studies, which I did.
View Interview with Tom Wolfe
View Biography of Tom Wolfe
View Profile of Tom Wolfe
View Photo Gallery of Tom Wolfe
|
|
Bob Woodward
Investigative Reporter
Bob Woodward: If somebody came from Mars to America and went around for months or years, and then you asked them who has the best jobs, they would say the journalists, because the journalists get to make momentary entries into people's lives when they are interesting, and get out when they cease to be interesting. And most jobs, if you are a lawyer or a doctor, you have to deal with clients, patients who have boring problems or diseases that are routine, and of course, the definition of "news" is "non-routine." What's going on in the town -- in culture, in the nation, in the world -- is news, and you get to work on that.
View Interview with Bob Woodward
View Biography of Bob Woodward
View Profile of Bob Woodward
View Photo Gallery of Bob Woodward
|
| |
