My First Book Was Published

I Got Interested In The Question Of Literacy Because Writers Are Always Moaning About Why More People Don't Read Books. They Long For The Good Old Days When People Read Serious Novels.

Justice Is The Well Water Of The City Of Novgorod, Black And Sweet.

It Was One Of The Great Mass Achievements Of American Civilization, And We Did It Because We Thought If You Were Going To Have A Democratic Form Of Government, People Had To Be Able To Read And Understand Complicated Ideas On Their Own.

As I Started Reading About It, I Saw That At The Beginning Of The 19th Century, Outside Of New England - Which Was An Unusually Literate Place - Practically No One Could Read Or Write. And Even In New England, The Overall Rate Was Only About 60 Percent. That Still Means Four Out Of 10 People Couldn't Put Their Name To A Will.

At Some Level, You Have To Be Able To Say, "this Is My Task." It's In Small, Local Ways That You Keep Yourself Alive And Refresh Ideas That Are Always Going Into Dead Abstraction.