Adam Gopnik

His father, a professor of eighteenth-century English literature, gave up almost all of his library when he moved into a seniors’ residence and kept three things: the poems of Alexander Pope, a complete Shakespeare, and Joyce’s Ulysses. Adam, thinking ahead to such a day of his own, picked out five.

Anthony Trollope had a small reputation when Adam first came to him and has grown in readers’ estimation since. He owns some thirty Trollopes in paperback; The Duke’s Children stands for them all. No one, he says, offers a world so truthful and yet so tenderly funny.

John Updike’s portrait hangs above the desk. Updike was his master rather than his mentor, the one writer whose approval or disapproval mattered most. If he could keep a single Updike it would be The Early Stories, the short fiction of 1953 to 1975, in what he calls the most lapidary sentences any American writer has offered.

S. J. Perelman is, in Adam’s judgment, the greatest American humorist, above Thurber and Benchley. The Road to Miltown stays delightful after you have read it too many times to laugh.

Albert Camus, for the editorials he wrote at Combat, the clandestine resistance paper, from 1944 to 1947. Whenever Adam is unsure how a piece on politics should sound, he picks up Camus again.

J. D. Salinger, whose reputation has gone up and down while readers’ love for him has not. Adam says Matt Salinger told him The Catcher in the Rye has sold 80 million copies. What keeps it is the most beautiful description of an adolescent heart he knows, and the most beautiful evocation of New York, down to the ducks on the Central Park pond.

And, remembered as he signs off, Philip Roth, the other mentor on the wall.