Engagements With History Punctuate Garry Wills's life
“Square,” “colorless,” “stodgy,” “unthreatening.” Those are some of the adjectives that the prolific journalist and historian Garry Wills uses to describe himself in “Outside Looking In,” his pointillistic new memoir.
Off the page, all those things may (or may not) be true. On it, as countless politicians and writers have learned, having Mr. Wills sternly contemplate your work can be like having the Red Baron on your tail. “Unthreatening” is hardly the word. Writing in The New York Review of Books and other journals, he’s sent entire squadrons of shoddy works and ideas down in flames.
Mr. Wills has written some 40 books of his own, from pinwheeling political analysis (“Nixon Agonistes,” published in 1970) to sober inquiry about celebrity (“John Wayne’s America,” published in 1997) to meditations on oratory and language. In 1993 he won a Pulitzer Prize for “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.”...
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Off the page, all those things may (or may not) be true. On it, as countless politicians and writers have learned, having Mr. Wills sternly contemplate your work can be like having the Red Baron on your tail. “Unthreatening” is hardly the word. Writing in The New York Review of Books and other journals, he’s sent entire squadrons of shoddy works and ideas down in flames.
Mr. Wills has written some 40 books of his own, from pinwheeling political analysis (“Nixon Agonistes,” published in 1970) to sober inquiry about celebrity (“John Wayne’s America,” published in 1997) to meditations on oratory and language. In 1993 he won a Pulitzer Prize for “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.”...