Anatole Broyard

Anatole Broyard, who eventually became a literary critic for The New York Times, reflects back on his life as a young man just returning from military service in World War II. Broyard's parents lived in Brooklyn but that wasn't the part of New York where Anatole Broyard was determined to live. Broyard had set his sights on the much more sophisticated and elite neighborhood of Greenwich Village.

Throughout Broyard's life, it was obvious from a very young age that he was captivated by literature. Some of his contemporaries were so rapt in their book reading that they literally transformed into the authors or the characters about whom they wrote . Broyard even considered some of the great authors as his uncles, albeit the black sheep of the family sort of relatives. Shortly after moving to the Village, he opened a second-hand bookstore which he stocked with the writers...