Older Writers Revisiting Their Younger Selves

They don't have much else in common, but Philip Roth, John Updike and Toni Morrison do resemble one another in at least one respect: their ages. Roth is 75 this year, Updike is 76, and Morrison is 77. (Roth and Updike are separated by exactly a year and a day.) Together these three are the ranking triumvirate of a literary generation that is way too all over the place to have a collective name--they ain't modernists, they ain't postmodernists--but that dominated American fiction for the second half of the 20th century. This year all three have arrived at an extraordinary moment...