Animal House
Shuffling through the vaccination and microchip records, reading the myriad names, I sometimes smile with nostalgic fondness, but more often my eyes mist as I am reminded of the multitudes we have loved but lost.
Posts by Cliff Froehlich
An Old Couple’s Search for Dignity
No one—in either real or reel life—wants to confront the difficulties of aging, the imminence of dying. The point is best proved by Leo McCarey’s glorious Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), the most unbearably moving and resolutely unsparing work Hollywood has ever made about the elderly.
Days of Wrath
The Joads and their fellow Oakies may be today’s Orange County conservatives, but the labor struggles and political tensions made real in the pages of Steinbeck’s most famous book resonate 75 years later, and counting.
About The Common Reader
The Common Reader, a publication of Washington University in St. Louis, offers the best in reviews, articles and creative non-fiction engaging the essential debates and issues of our time.
The Current Issue
The story of Delyte Morris and the Southern Illinois University he created is what Robert A. Harper calls “a story of unlikely success and a tragic end.” It does read like an American tragedy, somehow, based in a rustic start, ambition, ingenuity, and the fallibility of good intentions.
