Why Writing Matters

by
Nicholas Delbanco
Published in 2020
by Yale University Press

Joining titles such as Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters and Jay Parini’s Why Poetry Matters in Yale University Press’s Why X Matters series, the new volume by Delbanco explores questions of influence and the creative impulses toward imitation and originality. The author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction, Delbanco draws on his decades of teaching experience at Bennington College, Skidmore College, Columbia University, and elsewhere—he was director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor until 2015—to offer a kind of reading workshop, equal parts memoir, literary history, and scholarly analysis.