My local library still has a lot of dusty old books on the shelves, thank goodness. They have a pretty complete collection of Christopher Morley’s essays, published in the late '10s and early '20s. I’m reading the delightful “The Powder of Sympathy” (1923), which reads as modern as James Lilek’s daily “Bleat.”
Anyway, Morley recommends Thomas De Quincey as one of the liveliest and most amusing of essayists—I blush to confess I have never read him. Can anyone here recommend a good selection for me to start with?
[Morely also cites a 1905 novel called “The Spanish Sultry” as one of the most hilariously awful books ever published, so I am off to search for that, too . . . ]
I’d second COEO (especially the Easter Dream section) and also recommend “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” one of the classics of Shakespeare criticism.
Thank you for reminding me of him Eve. I picked up a collection of his essays a few years back. It has been sitting on my “to read” shelf for far too long. I’m especially looking forward to read his On Murder as one of the Fine Arts.
The NYPL turned out to be woefully deficient in its De Quincey dept. All I found was " . . . Opium Eater," which is about 40 pages long! I was hoping for something more on the lines of a Viking Portable . . . So I wound up getting out a biography of Christopher Morley, “Three Hours for Lunch,” by Helen Oakley.
Let me know how the biography is, Eve, I’d love to learn more about his life. When was it published?
I think the only de Quincey I’ve read is “Opium Eater,” too, although I may have encountered “Murder” in an anthology somewhere. Hence my not sticking my two cents into this thread earlier.
Morley’s writing style reminds me a lot of yours, Ike—so let us see if there are OTHER parallels . . . It is, sadly, a Teeny Press Book (Watermills Publishers, 1976), twenty pages were bound in upside-down, which is not promising.
I do note that he followed my life trajectory: Phila. Main Line to Baltimore to New York!