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Joseph Epstein

Biography

Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein is the author of 31 books, among them works on divorce, ambition, snobbery, friendship, envy and gossip. He has published 17 collections of essays and four books of short stories. He has been the editor of the American Scholar, the intellectual quarterly of Phi Beta Kappa, and for 30 years he taught in the English Department at Northwestern University. He has written for The New Yorker, Commentary, New Criterion, Times Literary Supplement, Claremont Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and other magazines both in the United States and abroad. In 2003, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.

Joseph Epstein

Books by Joseph Epstein

Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life
by Joseph Epstein - Autobiography, Nonfiction

An autobiography usually requires a justification. The great autobiographies --- those by Benvenuto Cellini, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Brooks Adams --- were justified by their authors living in interesting times, harboring radically new ideas or participating in great events. Joseph Epstein qualifies on none of these counts. His life has been quiet, lucky in numerous ways and far from dramatic. But it also has been emblematic of the great changes in our country since World War II. NEVER SAY YOU'VE HAD A LUCKY LIFE is an intimate look at one life steeped in radical change: from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one, from an era when the extended family was strong to its current diminished status, from print to digital life featuring the war of pixel on print, and on.

Snobbery: The American Version
by Joseph Epstein - Nonfiction