The portrait sketches of writers on these pages are various, joined only by the books they have left behind along a paper trail into the future. Which will last longer, asks the author, Dorothea Straus: the name of Edmund Wilson, Colette, Isaac Bashevis Singer, or Mary McCarthy? Although their work is the posterity of the artist, Dorothea Straus is more concerned, here, with her encounters with the men and women themselves. Each one has been quickened by the vagaries of personal recall and she follows where it leads, fleeting victories over the erasures caused by the inexorable passage of time.

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