Bily is an instructor of writing and literature at Adrian College. In this essay, Bily asks whether the United States in the beginning of the twenty-first century is sadly ripe for a revival of J. B.

Although some pieces of literature feel timeless, like Homer's Odyssey or some of the plays of Shakespeare, other perfectly fine works are products of a specific time and place and belong so strongly to that setting that they languish when their time is past. A cursory look at lists of winners of the Pulitzer Prizes or the National Book Awards reveals many works that have stood the test of time: novels and poetry that are still in print, plays that are still performed. Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, which won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; Edward Arlington Robinson's Collected Poems, winner of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for poetry; Ralph Ellison's Invisible...