To see the negligible, nearly invisible, presence that literature has in contemporary life one need only watch Jeopardy! I am constantly astounded by answers that seem obvious to me but are out of the reach of people with much greater stores of knowledge. Last night, under the category “The New Yorker at 100,” the clue was about a staff writer who wrote a classic essay on Ted Williams’ last at-bat as a Boston Red Sox. They showed a picture of the writer, along with the information that his dream as a boy growing up in a small Pennsylvania town was to one day write for The New Yorker. No one buzzed in. Though, later in the show, one contestant was able to identify “A Room of One’s Own” as a famous essay by Virginia Woolf.
