In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

This was the title of Buckley associate Jeffrey Hart's obituary in the Washington Post in early 2019. Dartmouth classmates contacted me as soon as the news broke. I think it's fair to say that for the time he taught there, from the early 1960s to 1995, Hart in many ways was Dartmouth. By the time of his retirement, his lectures had to be held in the largest auditorium facilities available. I was always more ambivalent. I went to graduate school in English at the University of Southern California, where partly under Hart's influence, I specialized in eighteenth century. But early in my time there, the professors who became my mentors took me aside. They'd been looking at my Dartmouth transcripts and had seen all the courses I'd taken from Hart. They explained to me in not quite the same words that Hart was a public dilettante, someone not to be taken seriously. Indeed, one of those who spoke to me was Donald Greene, acknowledged at the time to be Mr Samuel Johnson...