Why isn’t Brian Doyle famous? After all, these are boom times for essayists, relatively speaking. Nonfiction abounds on publishers’ lists, everything from traditional memoirs to lyric essay collections to ruminations on place to chronicles of living for a year on home-raised mushrooms or with a biblical beard. And creative nonfiction features in almost every literary journal now, expanding the categories beyond fiction and poetry and the occasional act of literary critcism. This American Life all by itself seems to have created a niche—and a subsequent college lecture circuit―for richly written, ear-to-the-ground personal essays that move, much in the way that Doyle’s work typically does, between the mundane and the revelatory.
