Few journalists have endeavored to crawl inside their subjects like Tom Wolfe. By applying the techniques, forms, and comic flare of fiction to the practice of reportage, he essentially created a new genre of writing. He gets inside people's heads, documenting almost every strange alcove of American
The essay did not always exist. Nor was the idea of recording one's personal introspections, whether in private diary or public form, always valued. It took centuries of evolution, from Seneca's philosophical epistles to the Christian confessional and beyond, before twentieth-century students would b
Jorge Luis Borges had a twisted sense of time. He placed us on the precipice of an infinite event, concentrating past, present, and future in a single coruscating constellation of time. Inspired by the philosophy of Leibnitz, Borges always presented us with a multiplicity of possible worlds. But
"Nothing is worse," Nietzsche once said, "than the smell of an ill-constituted soul." For this professor of Classics and son of a Protestant minister, things were not hidden, there were no secrets: the world revealed itself. From this base of materialism and realism, Nietzsche assaulted Christianity,