The remarkable thing about this collection of pieces by the late Robert Fitzgerald, who is best known for his enduring translations of the Odyssey, the Iliad, and the Aeneid, is not that he wrote graceful essays about translation but rather that a number of his memoirs and portraits of contemporaries place him in the first rank of writers. The memoirs propel him straightaway into the constellation that counts among its luminaries his friends William Maxwell and Peter Taylor, and the portraits of James Agee and Flannery O’Connor stand shoulder to shoulder with the elegies by Hannah Arendt collected in her book Men in Dark Times. His prose output, of course, was slighter than that of any of these writers, and while it is impossible to wish that Fitzgerald had taken time away from his monumental translations, it is hard not to wonder about the body of work he might have produced had his writing life taken a different turn. Readers have cause to be grateful that these pieces, which appeared over decades in magazines, journals, and as introductions, have been brought together here. As a whole, the book is interesting on two counts: first, as a vibrant record of a life of letters conducted with unfashionable self-effacement at a particular time, and with that time’s attendant tastes, sights, and sounds; and, on the second count, at which stroke all that is carried away as if by a gust of wind, as an intimate description of