Melville House Books

Steven Chu accepting the nomination for Secretary of Energy

William Faulkner waiting for his pants to come back from the drycleaners.

People across the US recoiled in shock earlier this week when an actual, real-live American politician stood at a rostrum flanked by an American president and quoted, gulp — a novelist! American mainstream media is apparently in too deep a state of shock to have actually, uh, you know, reported this astonishing development, or is perhaps too cretinously ill-read and de-cultured to have recognized the reference, but thanks to an intrepid book blogger we like to call Carolyn Kellogg (because that’s her name), we have this report: Intoduced at a press conference by President-elect Barack Obama as his nominee for energy secretary, Steven Chu stepped to the podium and promptly quoted William Faulkner. Said our new literary hunk of the old literary drunk: “On December 10, 1950, William Faulkner spoke at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm. He said, ‘I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, and sacrifice, and endurance.’”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.