Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World

In Great Books, Denby lives the common adult fantasy of returning to school with some worldly knowledge and experience of life. A gifted story-teller, he leads us on a glorious tour - by turns eloquent, witty, and moving - through the works themselves and through his experiences as a middle-aged man among freshmen. He recounts his failures and triumphs as a reader and student (taking an exam led to a hilarious near-breakdown). He celebrates his rediscovery or new appreciation of such authors as Homer, Plato, the biblical writers, Augustine, Boccaccio, Hegel, Austen, Marx, Nietzsche, and Virginia Woolf. He re-creates the atmosphere of the classroom - the strategies used by a remarkable group of teachers and the strengths and weaknesses of media-age students as they grapple with these difficult, sometimes frightening works. And all year long he watches the students grow and his own life and memories break out of hiding.

David Denby

David Denby has been film critic of New York magazine since 1978, and is a contributing editor of The New Yorker. His reviews and essays have also appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, novelist Cathleen Schine, and their two sons.