
Saul Steinberg’s cover illustration for “The New Yorker” (29 March 1976)
Wikimedia Commons fair use (largest resolution legally available)
I find that the hardest work in the world . . . is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling. (Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist and essayist)
(There’s New York theater, and then, in tiny villages like Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles, there’s regional theater. Larry McMurtry, a Texan who — among other things — has won both the Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award, used to wear a tee-shirt that read “Important Regional Novelist.” That was how the New York Times had described him after his Pulitzer. As if Manhattan isn’t, itself, a “region.” The poet Ezra Pound, who died in Italy but came to life in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885, spoke in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” of having been “born in a half savage country.”)