Frederic Will is a long-time professor of Comparative Literature, a historian of ideas, a marcher through lyric and anti-lyric poetry, a travel and short story writer, and a chronicler of the loneliness of the over-the-road trucker (Vide Big Rig Souls). His overriding intention as a writer is to sharpen the reader's insight into the role of imagination as an unfolder of the unexpected in the deepest ravines of the past. Put him on a desert island, fine, but make sure he has copies of Gilgamesh, the Persians, Ajax, and Philoctetes. The past, that is, is for this author the mercy of time, opening to us the chance to review human identity.