Excerpted from a letter to William Blackburn written July 23, 1949 from Valley Cottage, N.Y. Mr. Blackburn was a professor at Duke and an early mentor of William Styron’s.

Sean Wilentz is hardly your Quaaludes and vitriol music critic. That may be why the Bob Dylan in America author was commissioned to write the definitive history of one of America’s truly great record companies. Mr. Wilentz is also the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.

Vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard is a Russo family tradition. “I’m trying to remember the first time we took my daughters to the Vineyard, but I know they’ve been coming every year since they were 10 or 11, maybe even earlier,” said novelist Richard Russo, who in 2002 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his book Empire Falls.

Maggie Shipstead was not yet 30 when she finished her first novel, Seating Arrangements. The story, as she described it in a recent interview, is about “an ever-so-slightly dysfunctional Waspy family holding a shotgun wedding on a resort island.”

Ms. Shipstead has never been to the Vineyard before. It is of Nantucket that she speaks, naturally.

There is a large group of literature in the American canon referred to as “coming of age.” Though Susan Choi will discuss her new book, My Education, at a Saturday afternoon panel at the Harbor View Hotel entitled Coming of Age, she says it only partially belongs there.