“This passion for specificity, for the hypnotic materiality of the world one is in is all but at the heart of the task to which every American novelist has been enjoined since Herman Melville and his whale and Mark Twain and his river: to discover the most arresting, evocative verbal depiction for every last American thing." novelist Philip Roth on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2013. (clipping from the September 19, 1948 PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER ~ next month is the 70th anniversary of the publication of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD)