Vanity Fair's Writers On Writers edited by Graydon Carter

 Vanity Fair has collected, in this 2016 edition, various pieces published in the magazine that are written by authors about other authors.  It starts with Christopher Hitchens writing about Dorothy Parker and ends with an article about Kay Thompson, the author of the Eloise books, by Marie Brenner.  There is a section on poets such as W.H. Auden, E. E. Cummings and Marianne Moore.

One of my favorite sections was named Literary Lions.  There Anne Tyler wrote about Reynolds Price, Martin Amis about Saul Bellow and Michael Lewis about Tom Wolfe.  There were also articles about Eudora Welty, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Normal Mailer and Ernest Hemingway.

The next section was about writers who lived overseas and included articles about Paul Bowles, Gabriel Barcia Marquez, Primo Levi, Naguib Mafouz and Salman Rushdie.  The section Short Takes has articles about Willa Cather, James Baldwin, Roger Straus, Ward Just, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Beah, Robert Harris, Judy Blume, Wole Soyinka, Sonny Mehta and Christopher Hitchens. 

A Family Affair had Lili Anolik writing about Joan Didion, Dominick Dunne writing about his brother John Gregory Dunne and Mike Hogan writing about Dominick Dunne.  Memoir had articles by Laura Hobson, Arthur Miller and William Styron.  Styron wrote about his experience with depression and it was the best article on this topic I've read.  

A final section is titled Behind The Bestsellers.  It features articles about Josephine Tey, Grace Metalious, Mary McCarthy, Jacqueline Susann, Cormac McCarthy, Stieg Larsson, James Patterson and Donna Tartt.  It discusses the envy of those who write bestsellers and how their work is considered less than weighty tomes of literature.  It also discusses how money and fame has been a curse to some authors rather than the blessing they expected.  This book is recommended for anyone interested in literature and those who produce it for us.