Jack Thompson of All Trades A reminiscence of one of the most unusual New York intellectuals Although I spent eight years studying English at Stony Brook University, where I was an undergraduate from 1974 to 1978 and a Ph.D. student until 1983, I was never a good fit in academia. None of my professors was engaged in an activity that seemed even remotely appealing: If they weren’t eagerly annotating doodles and smudges in the margins of medieval psalters, they were overanalyzing some obscure 17th-century poem. Most ominous of all, every new faculty hire seemed to belong to some cockamamie new critical school that had nothing to do with loving books, which was why I’d signed up for literary study in the first place.