THE WALRUS SAID . . . . . . . . . being a bookish blog

Wednesday, September 2, 2026

The Biblio File: images of N.E. libraries, for bibliophiles

Fairfield University Library, Fairfield, Connecticut

David Levine on writers: Countee Cullen

David Levine (1926-2009) was one of America’s most prominent illustrators during a career that spanned decades. No less an authority than Jules Feiffer described him as "the greatest caricaturist of the last half of the 20th century,” although Levine continued to work in the early years of this century as well. Levine’s subjects included himself (above) and people from many walks of life. Authors, scribes and scribblers were a big part of the mix, as these caricatures make clear. 

Lit Toons: Cartoons with a bookish bent

First Lines: Philip Roth


I hadn't been in New York in eleven years. Other than for surgery in Boston to remove a cancerous prostate, I’d hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in those eleven years and, what’s more, had hardly looked at a newspaper or listened to the news since 9/11, three years back; with no sense of loss—merely, at the outset, a kind of drought within me—I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world but the present moment.

Exit Ghost
Philip Roth

"They say it's your birthday" - writers born on September 2



Cleveland Amory  (1917) 
Allen Drury  (1918)
Grady Nutt  (1934)