On Editing Oliver Sacks
Photo: Bill Hayes – Originally published in LitHub, April 23, 2019
As much as Oliver Sacks loved writing (and I do mean the very act itself—filling his fountain pen; starting a fresh yellow pad; whispering words aloud to himself as they came to him), he also loved getting published.
The “getting” part was a big part of it: Even after publishing 13 books and hundreds of essays and articles in his lifetime, Oliver still considered it a privilege to “get” his work in print. (The last piece he saw published, “Sabbath,” appeared in The New York Times just 15 days before his death on August 30, 2015.) His readers might be surprised to learn how little he cared about where a piece of writing first appeared. It did not have to be in the most prominent places—The New York Times, The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books, the holy trinity for writers in the US—though he certainly felt fortunate to have his work appear frequently in their pages. Oliver was just as happy (more…)
