
Modern Lover
The life of the unclassifiable writer, critic, and American philosophe Guy Davenport (1927–2005), spent largely as a university professor in Lexington, Kentucky, seems a cosmopolitan fantasy of how an intellectual might thrive in the provinces. “Living in Kentucky makes every other place delightful,” he once quipped, but Davenport’s isolation gave him the freedom to create prolifically—more than forty books spanning fiction, poetry, literary and art criticism, and translation—without the buzzings of the metropolis to distract him. His stories, published in collections from the ’70s to the ’90s,