DALE SALWAK is Professor of English and American Literature at Citrus College, California. He is the author of 28 books including Living with a Writer, Teaching Life: Letters from a Life in Literature, Writers and Their Mothers, and studies of Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Philip Larkin, Barbara Pym, and Carl Sandburg, amongst others. He is a frequent contributor to the (London) Times Higher Education magazine and the Times Educational Supplement.