My article, “Doing, not Reading: Cormac McCarthy on the Virtues and Dangers of Literature,” was published in Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice two weeks ago. In the article, I quote Andrew Delbanco’s The Real American Dream, a book that contains a lovely opening:

The premise of this book is that human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations amid which we pass our days–pain, desire, pleasure, fear–into a story. When that story leads somewhere and thereby helps us navigate through life to its inevitable terminus in death, it gives us hope.