Big John Canaday may not have had brains, but with or without a gun he had grit, and to this day I do not know why he befriended me, much less why he picked the least athletic person he knew to take Coach Butts out to dinner.  It may have been something as simple as the fact that my father owned a sports team, or–as I should prefer to think–that he knew I was at ease with grown-up men. Another bar (The Keg) in Charleston was owned by a Jewish prize-fighter who did not want kids in what was more...

My old man did not think much of writers; he had known too many of them.  He did not like what little he had seen of Hemingway and regarded his obsession with virility as unmanly.  He used to say, of a certain type of tuft-hunting spongers that they were the sort who called Hemingway “Papa.”  Hemingway, at least as a younger man, must have had few illusions about himself and his generation, and his first and best novel, The Sun Also Rises is an American’s Good-bye to All That, to manhood as well as civilization. In the novel poor Jake...

The problem with Warren—and with so many other celebrity racists—is not what they say or do but what they take for granted.  That poor white female who became an NAACP leader wanted desperately to be Black just as much as Warren wanted to be Indian.  Why?