I’m sure we’ll receive a raft of emails from outraged fans of William Humphrey’s work, but the Washington Post’s book critic (Johnathan Yardley) singled out the late Mr. Humphrey as a “Great Writer That Got Away.”

Odds are you’ve never heard of William Humphrey, much less read one of his several books, an unhappy reminder that even the best of writers — and from the publication of his first book in 1953 until his death in 1997, Humphrey was indeed one of the best — have a terribly hard time finding the readers they deserve.

…

So to make up for that, here are two exercises in what Humphrey called “the literature of angling”: “The Spawning Run” (1970) and “My Moby Dick” (1978). They really are longish essays disguised as books, padded out with large type and lovely illustrations, both having fewer than 100 pages, all of which merely goes to show that small is, or can be, beautiful.

I admit it; I hadn’t read either of Humphrey’s essay books. Have the Undergrounders?

See you at the library, Tom Chandler.

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