Nicholas Delbanco

Recently Nicholas Delbanco was interviewed by C-SPAN about his new book The Art of Youth.  Video footage of this interview can be found at the  C-SPAN Video Library.

In his nuanced and haunting “speculative inquiry” into the chronology of creativity, Delbanco considered prolonged productivity in Lastingness: The Art of Old Age (2011) and now investigates the opposite, profiling three very different artists who died young. Seeking to inhabit the inner and outer worlds of his intriguing subjects, Delbanco bridges indisputable facts and persistent […]

Elena and Nicholas Delbanco spoke on NPR’s Weekend Edition on the upcoming auction of their family’s famed Stradivarius cello known as the Countess of Stainlein. Download the interview » Listen to the interview on NPR » See Also: “Selling a 300-Year-Old Cello” on the The New York Times website »

Delbanco was featured prominently in a recent article in The New York Times: By DANIEL J. WAKIN Published: January 13, 2012 On a cold day last winter, an ailing Bernard Greenhouse, wearing an elegant bathrobe and attached to oxygen, was wheeled into the living room of his Cape Cod home, which was festooned with paper […]

By Nick Owchar, Los Angeles Times There were complaints when the aging William Butler Yeats took poems from his youth and revised them. The complaints were so strenuous that Yeats even wrote a response, in verse: The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song, Should know what issue is at […]

THE difference, for the traveler, between a first and repeated visit is crucial. To “go back” is not “to go.” Yet old, familiar places retain a kind of magic, and all the more so when the memories are shared. For our 40th wedding anniversary year, my wife, Elena, and I returned to the place where […]

Reeve Lindbergh recently reviewed Lastingness: the Art of Old Age for The Washington Post. From the review: Nicholas Delbanco’s new book examines creative achievement in old age, though the author acknowledges that our culture concerns itself primarily with the young. We seem, nonetheless, ambivalent about age, expecting our leaders to evince a certain maturity. Delbanco, […]

Lastingness was featured in a recent article for the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Books About Art and Aging.” The article, written by Jane Juska, starts: “Life, as we find it, is too hard for us,” writes Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontents.” “Palliative measures” are required. One such measure is a receptivity to art. (Another […]

Why do some artists seem to fade away while others last forever? Beth Kephart raises this question in her recent review of “Lastingness” for the Chicago Tribune. From the review: Six years ago, during one of my summer writers’ workshops, I found myself presented with a young man who was already (at the ripe age […]

The Los Angeles Times recently sat down with Delbanco to discuss his latest work, Lastingness: the Art of Old Age and the link between creativity and longevity. From the article by Scott Martelle: Nicholas Delbanco sits on a swivel chair in his second-floor writer’s study, his back to the desk, knees bent slightly as he […]