The combined offerings of Dickstein and Pinckney provoked an hour of vivid discussion in which everyone participated, and which no one seemed to want to arrest. We had to call a halt at 8 p.m. –RW
Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English and Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center. His most recent books are Leopards in the Temple, a study of postwar American fiction, A Mirror in Roadway, a collection of literary essays, and Dancing in the Dark, a cultural history of the Depression era, which received the Ambassador Book Award in American Studies and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism.
Darryl Pinckney, a long time contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture series, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. He is at work on a study of African American literature in the twentieth century.