Nonfiction | December 01, 1996
Drummer Man
Jeffrey Hammond
This essay is not currently available online.
It’s late afternoon on a hot Friday in early June, and I’m sitting in a plaza in a close-in suburb of Washington, D.C. I’m working, without much energy, on a typical summer project for an English profesor: a study of the funeral elegies of Puritan New England. I always write my scholarship in public places like this. Writing is lonely work, even when your subject isn’t seventeenth-century funerary poems, and it’s a comfort to look up and see people going about their business.
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