Those years are the lively childhood of our era already we see their gaiety and sadness transfigured.” We feel a greater nostalgia looking back over that short distance than we do looking back twenty centuries to antiquity. The thirty years of peace, prosperity and internal dissension which lie across 1900 wear a bright, almost blatant color. “The French call it la belle époque - the good old days. Here is the way his first book, The Banquet Years (1956), an instant classic about the French avant garde, opens: And he wrote with the care of a prose poet. He went after each new project with the energy of an excited undergraduate. A week before his death he was still ordering books through interlibrary loan. He was the consummate scholar and man of letters. He was, for many of us, a beacon of sanity during strange times within the Academy, times when labels like Left and Right, Radical and Conservative, Progressive and Reactionary had became potent substitutes for thought. I write in praise of our esteemed friend, colleague and teacher, Roger Shattuck, who died on Decemat the age of 82.
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