Ted Solotaroff is a distinguished editor, critic, lecturer and memoirist. He was the founding editor of New American Review, later American Review (1967-1977), the most widely read and influential literary magazine of its time. He previously had edited Commentary and Book Week and later was a senior editor at Harper & Row. He is the author of the memoirs Truth Comes in Blows, which received the 1998 PEN award for the art of the memoir, and First Loves.
Many writers, but perhaps not enough readers, know just how vital, creative and central a figure Ted Solotaroff has been in contemporary letters; as the most influential editor of his time, he shaped not only tastes, but the direction of American writing. These essays provide an insight into the genius of the editor...
—Ian McEwan
The literary community Solotaroff describes and,in his odd, varied way, helps create, is one intelligent, feeling people want to inhabit. Here the idiosyncratic, modest, insular, naive and mad fuse with comprehensive sanity, grandeur and beauty.
—Richard Sterm
Possessing, as he does, a writer's intimacy with the struggles and achievements of other writers, his own prose at once warm and luminous registers the mind and heartbeat and texture of the prose of authors different as Carver and Munro, Bellow and Fowles. I can think of no other writer, critic, editor, teacher, who exemplifies in eloquence and practice the ideal of a literary community.
—Eugene Goodheart
These wise, lucid, superbly humane essays have been mined from deep tunnels of insight and experience, and polished by a master's hand. A few, like "Writing in the Cold," have been passed around like samizdat for years, providing counsel, solace, and nerve to a generation of American writers.
—Robert Cohen
