James Campbell writes a weekly column for the Times Literary Supplement and is the author of This Is The Beat Generation, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin, and Exiled in Paris. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

"'Syncopations' should interest any observer of postwar American letters." -- Sam Munson New York Times Book Review "[Campbell's] best pieces deftly and economically capture the essence of their subjects, measuring the particular 'syncopations' that distinguish their work." -- Bharat Tandon Times Literary Supplement (TLS) "The object is neither to titillate nor to shock - though certain of Mr. Campbell's profiles do both - but to illumine. And this they accomplish splendidly." -- Eric Ormsby New York Sun

• Preface Acknowledgments PART I NEW YORK NEW YORKERS 1. Sunshine and Shadows: AProfile of John Updike 2. Updike's Village Sex 3. William Maxwell's Lives 4. Notes from a Small Island: AProfile of Shirley Hazzard 5. Love, Truman: Capote's Letters and Stories 6. Franzen, Oprah, and High Art 7. Drawing Pains: A Profile of Art Spiegelman 8. Listening in the Dark: AProfile of William Styron PART II THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE 9. I Heard It through the Grapevine: James Baldwin and the FBI 10. The Island Affair: Richard Wright's Unpublished Last Novel 11. The Man Who Cried: John A. Williams 12. All That Jive: Stanley Crouch 13. Love Lost: Toni Morrison 14. The Rhetoric of Rage: AProfile of Amiri Baraka PART III SYNCOPATIONS 15. High Peak Haikus: AProfile of Gary Snyder 16. Between Moving Air and Moving Ocean: Thom Gunn and Gary Snyder 17. Was That a Real Poem?: Robert Creeley 18. Fifty Years of "Howl" 19. Personal/Political: AProfile of Edmund White 20. To Beat the Bible: AProfile of J. P. Donleavy 21. The Making of a Monster: Alexander Trocchi 22. Travels with RLS Coda: Boswell and Mrs. Miller; A Memoir of Two Tongues