Penn in Ink

My son hopes to go to Penn next year, so we toured the campus a few weeks ago. At the bookstore I saw a display of this book and picked one up, attracted by the colorful subtitle, not to mention the delightful Ronald Searle cover illustration. I guess I would describe this as sort of an offbeat history of the University, and even though I found out that the pieces are from the alumni magazine, you don't have to be an alum to find them fascinating. As someone with a master's in literature, I was most interested in the literary figures who made their debuts at Penn: Who knew that the poets William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound became friends while at Penn? (when Pound was 16!) Zane Grey went to Penn on a baseball scholarship -- as a dental student, if you can get your mind around that (he shows up with Doc Holliday, another Penn grad, in the "Swashbuckling Dentists" section). Yet a third dentist, Thomas Evans, was hard at work in France during the American Civil War, tending to "royal bicuspids" and persuading Napoleon not to enter the war on the side of the Confederacy! But these are not all puff pieces about famous and illustrious alums. Hughes doesn't stint on the controversy, including pieces on Stephen Glass (famously fired for plagiarism by the New Republic, he began his journalism career as editor of Penn's undergraduate newspaper) and professor Scott Nearing (who I'd never even heard of), fired from Penn in 1915 due to his socialist politics Finally unlike many writers who seem to randomly fling their thoughts onto the page, Hughes clearly spends time crafting the well-wrought phrase, which in addition to his fascinating subject matter makes this first-rate book a delight to read.