The End of Solitude reveals a man disenchanted with academic life, but who still underestimates the depth of our cultural corruption.
There comes a time in life when lamentation is one of its greatest consolations, and William Deresiewicz, the author of The End of Solitude, appears to have reached that age. This is not to say that what he laments is not lamentable: good reasons for lamentation are never lacking. In fact, I have myself made a small but enjoyable career of such lamentation.
The author, William Deresiewicz, wanted nothing so much as to teach literature in a university: indeed, he had a vocation for it. He taught for ten years at Yale but gave up his academic career for two reasons: first, he couldn’t find a permanent and properly-paid job, and second, the academy had been so morally, intellectually, and financially corrupted that he preferred to try his chances as a freelance writer, and thereby become a free man.
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in Law & Liberty
