In this installment of the Why I Write series, based on Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Lectures, Greil Marcus explores the power and mystery of art and writing. The music journalist, cultural critic, and coeditor of the anthology A New Literary History of America (Belknap Press, 2009), examines his love of writing through three significant influences—his childhood haunted by the silence around his father’s death, his discovery of the film critic Pauline Kael, and an encounter with a sixteenth-century painting by Italian painter Titian. Through each section of the book, Marcus reflects on what makes writing so captivating, distinctive, and necessary. “Writing is rooted in memory: in some alchemy of responses, particular to everyone, with no one’s translation of life the same,” writes Marcus. “I write to discover what I want to say and how to say it—and the nerve to say it.”
