Joseph Epstein
Myron Joseph Epstein is an American essayist, short story writer, and university teacher born in Chicago on January 9, 1937.
Educated at Senn High School and later at the University of Chicago, Epstein built a career that moved across several related roles: writer, essayist, publisher, and teacher. His longest institutional tenure came as editor of The American Scholar, a position he held from 1975 to 1997. During those two decades, he shaped the magazine while continuing to produce his own work in English across both fiction and nonfiction forms. He has published collections of his essays and short stories, as well as books devoted to single subjects, among them ambition, snobbery, envy, friendship, and charm. That range of topics suggests a sustained preoccupation with the textures of social and moral life, though the specific arguments and conclusions belong to the work itself rather than to any summary account of it. In recognition of his contributions to American letters, he received the National Humanities Medal, one of the country's highest honors in the humanities.
The subjects Epstein has returned to across his career — ambition, envy, charm, friendship, snobbery — trace a coherent if unannounced project: the close examination of how people conduct themselves toward one another and toward their own aspirations. His writing occupies the essay form and the short story with equal seriousness, and his years editing The American Scholar placed him at the center of American intellectual periodical culture for more than two decades. The Library of Congress catalogs him under "Epstein, Joseph, 1937-," a designation that marks both his birth year and the ongoing nature of a body of work still identified with those recurring human concerns.
Quotes by Joseph Epstein
My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can't.
And it is a good thing that many ideas have a relatively short shelf-life. Some because they are bad, even pernicious ideas: the Master Race, the class struggle, the Oedipus complex, and Socialism are four bad ideas with wretched consequences that come immediately to mind.
Someone – Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? – once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.
The best way to ensure that your writing is as good as you can make it is simply to consult your imagination and judgment as you write and take note of whether you are using an expression that has found its way into the stream simply because it’s always there, swirling lifelessly in an eddy, where it was recently deposited by some other writer you have read.
The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one’s thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum.
Envy is never general, but always very particular – at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.
By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don’t hesitate.
My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can’t.