George Scialabba

George Scialabba grew up in East Boston, in the shadow of Logan Airport. He distinguished himself as an altar boy at Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish and a third-baseman for the Mount Carmel Mohawks. He graduated Harvard College in 1969 and spent a year in graduate school at Columbia (European intellectual history), dropping out in 1970, never to return. Through most of the 1970s he meandered around the counterculture, knowing that something was happening there but never knowing what it was.

In 1980 he debuted as a freelance book critic, becoming a regular contributor to the Village Voice, Boston Phoenix, Boston Globe, Boston Review, The Nation, Dissent, L.A. Weekly, Bookforum, and Commonweal before breaking into the big leagues (i.e., The Baffler) in 2012.

He has published four essay collections: What Are Intellectuals Good For? The Modern Predicament, For the Republic, and Low Dishonest Decades (all available from Pressed Wafer). His writing is archived at www.georgescialabba.net, where you’ll also find his email address and an invitation to write him about anything you read there that interests you. He is nominally on Facebook and Twitter (@GeorgeScialabba) but pretty much invisible on both.

Source: The Baffler