This book is O'Rourke's first volume of nonfiction since his 1972 The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, which Garry Wills hailed as "a clinical x-ray of our society's condition." That book prompted Herbert Mitgang to name O'Rourke "one of the finest writers of his generation." Signs of the Literary Times provides new evidence for that assessment. It brings together O'Rourke's unique mixture of literary, political, and cultural criticism ...
This new collection is William O'Rourke's third volume of a diverse mixture of long and short articles and it extends his reputation as a brilliant social historian and curmudgeonly contrarian. More political than his previous two volumes (Signs of the Literary Times, 1993, Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer, 2012), it additionally serves as an illuminating memoir of his literary generation. These provocative pieces analyze the contemporary tu...
During the first three months of 1972 a trial took place in the middle district of Pennsylvania: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA versus Eqbal Ahmad, Philip Berrigan, Elizabeth McAlister, Neil McLaughlin, Anthony Scoblick, Mary Cain Scoblick, Joseph Wenderoth. The defendants stood accused of conspiring to raid federal offices, to bomb government property, and to kidnap presidential advisor Henry Kissinger. Six of those seven individuals are, or we...
William O'Rourke, a former columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, is author of The Meekness of Isaac, Idle Hands, Criminal Tendencies, and Notts, and five works of nonfiction. He is editor of On the Job: Fiction about Work by Contemporary American Writers and (with John Matthias) of the collection Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years.
With a description of what an MI feels like and how people around the patient react, this memoir provides a view of the author's experience and the emotions that accompanied it. It describes the pain of the attack, the forced inactivity of recuperation, and the melancholy of embracing life anew while accepting a heightened awareness of mortality.
William O'Rourke has taught at Rutgers University, Mount Holyoke College, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
