Nicholas Delbanco

One of the country's leading literary scholars explores the fascinating question of why some people's creative talents flourish with age while others' fade. America grows older yet stays focused on its young. Whatever hill we try to climb, we're "over" it by fifty and should that hill involve entertainment or athletics we're finished long before. And if younger is better, it doesn't appear that youngest is best: we want our teachers, doctors, generals,...

"The Years is about the passage of time: from youth to middle age to the winter of life. Forty years after their intense but doomed college romance, Lawrence and Hermia meet again on a Mediterranean cruise. They fall in love even more deeply, but being in their sixties, with plenty of baggage, they wonder if marriage is the right move. When Lawrence visits Hermia's home on Cape Cod, she has one request: "Please stay." What happens when he does fills...

In this new contribution to Yale University Press's Why X Matters series, a distinguished writer and scholar tackles central questions of the discipline of writing. Drawing on his own experience with mentors such as John Updike, John Gardner, and James Baldwin, and in turn having taught such rising stars as Jesmyn Ward, Delbanco looks in particular at questions of influence and the contradictory, simultaneous impulses toward imitation and originality....