Our hotel in Atlanta was just down the street from Manuel's Tavern.
In the mid-80s I worked for the Observer, the monthly publication of the American College of Physicians. It was an interesting but thankless job, writing feature stories about doctors who were too busy keeping up with the medical literature to read them. One day my editor told me I should fly to Atlanta and write a story about a professor at Emory medical school who was having his students read literary classics.
I called the professor, who told me the date and place of their next meeting: Manuel's Tavern. The book they would be discussing was Madame Bovary.
I flew down to Atlanta and checked into my hotel; then I took a taxi to the tavern. I remember sitting there thinking: This is what I want to do - travel the world and talk to people in bars (even if they're med students discussing Flaubert) - and wondering if I would ever get the chance to do so.
