A dangerous profession

the long version

Frederick Busch has an enduring love affair with great books and with the difficult, and sometimes personally dangerous, work that is required to produce them. For Busch, as he writes of his own career and those of his great elders, there was to be no other recourse save the dangerous profession. Writing out of an experience of risk that is suffused with affection, Busch explores the life a writer leads and its effect on a writer, whether he be Melville, Dickens, or Hemingway.