Norman Snider

William Patrick Kinsella died, at a moment of his own choosing, with the help of a physician in September 2016. Back in 1982, Kinsella published his most famous novel, the baseball tale Shoeless Joe. His folksy adult fantasy story was a writer’s home run. A laser shot, out of the yard. Kinsella’s book went through more than 30 printings in paperback in no time at…

Most writers of fiction find it impossible to make a respectable living entirely from their book sales. For many years now, teaching college has been their preferred way of staying afloat. As a result, the campus novel, from Herzog to Blue Angel, in this time of mandatory accreditation, has developed one of the more important themes of the age:…

The greatest hero of pop culture, from The Last of the Mohicans to American Sniper, is the gunfighter. Whether he is an outlaw, a town marshal, a private eye, a gangster, a soldier or a James Bond secret agent—or even if the character is a Charlie’s Angels–style woman—he is a hawkeye…

“Families are always rising or falling in America,” said Nathaniel Hawthorne. The highest a family can rise, I suppose, is by establishing itself as a baronial dynasty such as the Vanderbilts or Kennedys, achieving a comfortable financial security that lasts through the generations. An astute observer of contemporary society in his Esquire magazine…

A few years ago, when I first journeyed to far Hollywood, The Studio, as Joyce Carol Oates portentously calls it in Blonde, put me up at the Chateau Marmont, an antique mock-Norman castle that might have been designed by Charles Addams and whose dark reputation was out of the pages of de…