Anne's dad

The dancing, smart work of Anne Fadiman in her small volumes of familiar essays is the sort of writing most deeply satisfying to my soul. As I said before, she's Interrupt the Husband worthy. I love, love, love her work.

She came by her linguistic artistry through both nature and nurture, and her essays that include her family are laugh-out-loud delicious.

Her dad was Clifton Fadiman, US author, editor, & radio host (1904 - 1999), one of the twentieth century’s foremost critics, essayists, and anthologists, he viewed his primary occupation as reading–or, as he liked to put it, “the odd, parochial mania for decoding black squiggles on white paper.” The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction offers a Clifton Fadiman Medal to "to recognize a work of fiction by a living American author that is deserving of rediscovery and a wider readership."

Clifton Fadiman said stuff like this:

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

and a personal favorite:

For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.