Esquire

Guess what I found while rummaging around in my garage. A 37-year-old copy of Esquire that I'd been saving for some strange reason. It's the Fortieth Anniversary Issue, just over 500 pages long and containing articles and stories by nearly all the major American writers of the Twentieth Century--Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, James Baldwin, Dorothy Parker, Sinclair Lewis, Saul Bellow, Thomas Wolfe, H. L. Mencken, Damon Runyon, Ralph Ellison, Tennessee Williams, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, John O'Hara, Philip Roth, and Truman Capote. You might try to identify some or all of those people who appear on the front cover, the three most obvious being Hemingway second from left, Fitzgerald taking a drink from the waiter, and Capote in his oh so neat white suit and hat. I find it a little odd that of the thirty-nine people on their cover, only two are women--Nora Ephron and Dorothy Parker. I guess I must have first obtained this issue of Esquire to use in my American lit classes and then kept it all these years as a curiosity piece that could someday be worth a lot of money. Hah! And just what market would I go to for the sale of this item? I don't know. Maybe on E-Bay where some fool just like me would buy it for five bucks. Or not. I guess, instead, I'll just include it with the books I'm taking to Dysart High School.