When I was seven, I watched my father get crushed by the weight of a failed tenure bid. I of course didn't understand what was going on at the time, but I remembered a change in his posture, how he went from saying, I thought proudly, that he was a professor at the University of Chicago to uttering, almost under his breath, that he was an adjunct professor at Roosevelt. I didn't know until years later how he had struggled to piece together a life for us, that the unfinished book on Ralph Ellison that had been a passion, that lost him tenure, was now an unfinished book that meant nothing good to him. He took other jobs on occasion, among them driving a taxi, and fell hopelessly into himself. When I was just fourteen, I was the one who found him in the basement with only most of his head intact. [...]