Background
Lopate, Phillip was born on November 16, 1943 in New York City. Son of Albert and Frances (Berlow) Lopate.
(East Side, West Side, from the Little Red Lighthouse to B...)
East Side, West Side, from the Little Red Lighthouse to Battery Park City, the wonders of Manhattan’s waterfront are both celebrated and secret–hidden in plain sight. In his brilliant exploration of this defining yet neglected shoreline, personal essayist Philip Lopate also recovers a part of the city’s soul. A native New Yorker, Lopate has embraced Manhattan by walking every inch of its perimeter, telling stories on the way of pirates (Captain Kidd) and power brokers (Robert Moses), the lowly shipworm and Typhoid Mary, public housing in Harlem and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. He evokes the magic of the once bustling old port from Melville’s and Whitman’s day to the era of the longshoremen in On the Waterfront, while appraising today’s developers and environmental activists, and probing new plans for parks and pleasure domes with river views. Whether escorting us into unfamiliar, hazardous crannies or along a Beaux Arts esplanade, Waterfront is a grand literary ramble and defense of urban life by one of our most perceptive observers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385497148/?tag=2022091-20
(In the 1960s, prizewinning writer Philip Lopate went into...)
In the 1960s, prizewinning writer Philip Lopate went into an urban school to teach poetry and became a part of the school community. Being with Children, first published in 1975 but out of print for many years, is Lopate's classic account of his relationship to his craft and to his young students. Hailed by the New York Times as "a wise and tender portrait of a small society," Lopate's book explores the horrible and beautiful aspects of being with young people five hours a day, and explains why teachers persist in staying with the public schools and trying to make them into places where young people can flower.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007R941FC/?tag=2022091-20
( Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining re...)
Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the "foremost interpreters of . . . our recent contemporary moment." Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years. Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691135703/?tag=2022091-20
( “Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spe...)
“Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live,” begins the title essay by Phillip Lopate. This rejoinder to the cult of hedonism and forced conviviality moves from a critique of the false sentimentalization of children and the elderly to a sardonic look at the social rite of the dinner party, on to a moving personal testament to the “hungry soul.” Lopate’s special gift is his ability to give us not only sophisticated cultural commentary in a dazzling collection of essays but also to bring to his subjects an engaging honesty and openness that invite us to experience the world along with him. Also included here are Lopate’s inspiring account of his production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with a group of preadolescents, a look at the tradition of the personal essay, and a soul-searching piece on the suicide of a schoolteacher and its effect on his students and fellow teachers. By turns humorous, learned, celebratory, and elegiac, Lopate displays a keen intelligence and a flair for language that turn bits of common, everyday life into resonant narrative. This collection maintains a conversational charm while taking the contemporary personal essay to a new level of complexity and candor.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803222734/?tag=2022091-20
("Notes on Sontag" is a frank, witty, and entertaining ref...)
"Notes on Sontag" is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the 'foremost interpreters of...our recent contemporary moment.' Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years. Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IFXUGY4/?tag=2022091-20
writer English language educator
Lopate, Phillip was born on November 16, 1943 in New York City. Son of Albert and Frances (Berlow) Lopate.
Bachelor, Columbia University, 1964. Doctor of Philosophy, Union Graduate School, 1979.
Education director Teachers & Writers Collaborative, New York City, 1968-1980. Associate professor English University Houston, 1980-1988. Adjunct professor English Columbia University, 1988-1992, professor professional practice, since 2008.
Professor English Bennington (Vermont) College, 1992-1993, Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, since 1993.
(East Side, West Side, from the Little Red Lighthouse to B...)
( “Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spe...)
("Notes on Sontag" is a frank, witty, and entertaining ref...)
( Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining re...)
(In the 1960s, prizewinning writer Philip Lopate went into...)
(For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has...)
(Book by Lopate, Phillip)
(Book by Lopate, Phillip)
(First Edition)
(Great book!)
Juror Pulitzer Prize, New York City, 1984, National Book Award, New York City, 1990, Associated Writing Programs, 1993. Various committees Municipal Arts Society, New York City, since 1989. Member Authors Guild, Teachers & Writers Collaborative (board directors since 1980), Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association.
Fellow American Academy Arts & Sciences.
Married Carol Ascher, January 15, 1964 (divorced 1968). Married Cheryl Cipriani, December 31, 1990.