“Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors,” Ernest Hemingway once wrote, with typical pugnacity. But are the critics sometimes right? In this occasional series we'll examine the early careers of now-beloved authors to see what the critics first made of them.

Every profile of Joan Didion begins the same way: some quasi-poetic observation of the slight figure she cuts out there in the world, seguing to a contrast with what has often been called the "steely" quality of her prose. (Most hilariously awkward of these: a 1970 Los Angeles Times profile that tries to sustain an extended metaphor [...]

The chatter started last spring: Sarah Palin was writing a memoir, and it would be published in 2010. I moved my literary terror alert level from blue ("guarded") to yellow ("elevated"), but I figured I had plenty of time to prepare, figured I could safely spend the summer dozing-and then, last week, I awoke to a sudden code red. The chatter had changed: Sarah Palin had written swiftly and devotedly, her publication date was now November 17, 2009, and the title of the memoir would be Going Rogue: An American Life.

You'll have thoughts on this one: "I have a confession to make: I could never actually finish Kerouac's On the Road. I found it unreadable and shallow, but continued to cite it as the best book of all time and carry it around in my pocket to keep up my beatnik image."

I hadn't really caught on to the whole David Shields thing because I always get him a little confused in my mind with Chris Hedges, who had to quit his job at the Times to be himself, and who I admire. This is only because they both have these bland guy names. (And lots of S's and H's and things.) So imagine my surprise when I read a little bit of what David Shields' project is and what he has to say and it's all pretty off-putting. Today Shields publishes a defense of his new book, Reality Hunger, which is a manifesto of some sort: he's responding to [...]