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We weren’t famous, but we were popular, at least in a limited, local sense. That meant we had connections. We hosted bands when they came through town and then asked and received the same favors, in turn. Each summer, we toured south to Asheville, North Carolina—Big Rock Candy Mountain as we called…

I owe much of what I’ve come to know about hanging out to both of my Pittsburgh bands, but especially to The Armadillos. It was with them that I gained, or perhaps gave myself, permission to revel in the kind of shared quest for meaning that is the privileged domain of youth. In the other band, the…

The novelist Rick Moody says in his wonderful Hotels of North America that blank spaces like hotel rooms—or, in my case, a friend’s apartment in a foreign city—help us to “see the horizon, even if there is no land to be witnessed there.” They promote introspection and mental adjustment, which is ma…

[...] These stories would spin out and hook up with others, like the one about the time when Paul got caught by a blizzard on I-89 and spent the better part of a day trapped in his car in the company of a bunch of his own graduate students. These were stories of other times and other parties, essen…

Between McCullers and Green, then, we have two snapshots of what it was like to party in the year 1939, in the midst of the Great Depression, or the “Great Slump” as it was known in England. Though ostensibly quite different, and with a whole ocean separating their respective authors, these two nov…