In a popular culture defined more and more by the new and the temporary, veteran writer Nicholas Delbanco has been thinking a lot lately about the old and the established. It's a bit self-directed, ...

Spring and Fall by Nicholas Delbanco Warner, 304 pp., $24.99 The English critic George Saintsbury once observed of a mediocre novelist that his novels had every quality of great novels except the ...

"[M]oney changes things," Delbanco's saga allows, as it slips across generations to examine the bonds of inheritance, fiscal and otherwise, linking three siblings. When the scattered ...

Some books, let’s face it, are hard to read. They’re edifying, maybe, and self-consciously smart, and perhaps we’re better people for having duly turned the pages, but we know–all of us know–the ...

In this accessible but uneven counterbalance to his earlier Lastingness: The Art of Old Age (2011), University of Michigan professor Delbanco studies the lives of ...

The life of a writing professor may strike some people as fairly tame and unglamorous, but Delbanco (The Lost Suitcase) offers up this collection of essays as evidence to the contrary. Though travel ...

Students of the American Revolution know Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, as an American royalist spy. Historians of science will tell you he co-founded the Royal Institution and gave the great ...

Give it all. Nicholas Delbanco has shown throughout his career that the finest quality of a writer is to be generous. A highpoint of his 2001 essay collection, “The Lost Suitcase,” (the title refers ...