The peculiar generation

Those Americans born from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, the pre-Boomers, have never had a “generation” to call their own. Richard Pells mourns this oversight and stoutly stands to defend them in The Chronicle Review. It’s a pity the very most important names he can summon are George Lucas, Bob Dylan, Dick Cheney, and Joe Biden.

A member of that same cohort, Joseph Epstein (b. 1937) is also feeling elegiac. In a long essay about the stages of life, and notably about the exit stage, Epstein (the cheerfully irascible author, essayist, and former editor of The American Scholar) looks back and takes stock in a rather summary essay in Notre Dame Magazine.

Where does Browser find things like that? In this case, from the amazing smorgasbord of interesting articles found by the tireless readers and aggregators at Arts & Letters Daily. Both Arts & Letters Daily and the Chronicle Review are offshoots or platforms or whatever of the outstanding industry newspaper, The Chronicle of Higher Education, which also publishes The Chronicle of Philanthropy.