In 1988, when he was a tenured professor of English at Brooklyn College -- the department's "Shakespeare guy," as he put it -- Richard Horwich published "Shakespeare's Dilemmas," which examined the dilemma-torn heroes so ubiquitous in the Bard's plays.
That milestone led to a dilemma all his own. "When I wrote 'Shakespeare's Dilemmas,' my wife, Nancy, said to me, 'If you write another book, I'll leave you,' " he said recently in his house in Northwest Woods. "I was so hard to get along with."
Fortunately, she changed her mind, and last year. Mr. Horwich published a very different kind of book: "10024: A Memoir," which is both fascinating and very funny -- a love letter not only to Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he spent much of his life, but also to family, friends, and academia.
During the course of his teaching career, Mr. Horwich also published many scholarly articles, whose enticing titles include "Wives, Courtesans, and the Economics of Love in Jacobean City Comedy" and " 'I Sing but after You': Shakespeare's Internal Parody."
When he retired from academia, "I still had my writing chops, so I decided to write another scholarly book, about Shakespeare's old men." The idea came from teaching a class of elderly people when he was in his 20s; he found his students to be most interested in Shakespeare's older characters. "When I retired I was in my 70s, and I thought it was a field that hadn't been touched."
A "fancy agent" took him on, and the book was going well, when, two-thirds of the way through, "somebody else published a book that was almost the same book I was writing."
Swearing off the scholarly approach, Mr. Horwich wrote the first chapter of what became "10024." Set in 1945, when he was 6 years old, the first chapter finds the author and his father in the two front seats of the upper deck of a Fifth Avenue bus, "a trip on the bridge of a land yacht cruising south in New York City."
In 1946, after his father lost a job in advertising, the family moved to Hollywood, where his father wound up in the writers' wing of Paramount Studios. He worked on 10 screenplays, but the family returned to New York after a year and settled on West 77th Street.
Mr. Horwich pointed to a row of leather-bound volumes on a bookshelf. "That's a set of Shakespeare my father bought when he had no money but couldn't resist buying it." His father also took his 10-year-old son to see the film of Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet."
"I was mesmerized."
"That so many of the people my parents knew were actors, writers, and directors had to have had an influence on me," Mr. Horwich said.
While he was away at boarding school, his parents moved to Central Park West. Although his father had written dozens of plays, none of which was ever produced, his parents' social orbit came to include the playwright Clifford Odets, the director Elia Kazan, the producer Harold Clurman, and the actor Stella Adler, who became a close friend of his mother.
His boarding school was not well known, he said, "and didn't prepare me for anything, [but] Cornell was willing to take a chance." He enrolled there, eventually majoring in English. One of his classmates was Thomas Pynchon, with whom he took several creative-writing classes.
"One funny thing happened in class with Tom. Everybody had read my story, and Pynchon and the professor were arguing about some detail in it. They talked about it for ten minutes without glancing my way until Tom said, 'We have the author here, let’s ask him.' And I said, 'I have no idea.' "
"I was embarrassed by that, but later literary theory maintained that the author’s intention is almost beside the point."
After Cornell, Mr. Horwich enrolled in the M.A. program at Columbia. "It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life." Columbia had some highly celebrated faculty members, among them Lionel Trilling, Mark van Doren, and Jacques Barzun, but they only taught undergraduates. Meanwhile, the graduate faculty was "a mixture of snobbery and self-satisfaction," he writes in "10024."
However, after earning his master's and going to work for Harry Abrams publishing -- a job from which he was fired -- Mr. Horwich returned to Columbia for his Ph.D. Six years later, in 1967, he earned the doctorate and landed a tenure-track teaching position at Brooklyn College.
His doctoral dissertation was titled "Marriage and Money in English City Comedy, 1597-1625." Dissertations that eventually get published are usually overseen by a faculty advisor with connections among editors at publishing houses, but Mr. Horwich's advisor "had no such connections, never having published a book, or anything else as far as I can tell." He eventually cut the thesis into five scholarly articles, all of which saw print.
Years later, while on sabbatical, he was thinking, he recalled, about "The Merchant of Venice," his favorite of Shakespeare's plays, "and what popped into my mind about all these characters in that play, and in some of the other plays, was that the characteristic form personal problems take in Shakespeare is, being unable to make up one's mind. 'To be or not to be.' And he got a lot of mileage out of that. I wrote 'Shakespeare's Dilemmas,' and I was very happy with it. I'm still very happy with it."
In 1998, after the City University of New York offered a pension increase to full professors if they would take early retirement, Mr. Horwich left Brooklyn College and moved to New York University as an adjunct professor. In 2005 he received an Outstanding Teaching Award there.
"I didn’t realize until I taught at N.Y.U. how friendly and supportive a graduate program could be. Columbia was this stiff, formal place, modeled, I think, on English universities in the 18th century."
Back in 1967, in addition to earning his Ph.D., Mr. Horwich had met Nancy Wasserman, who at the time was working for the television quiz show "Reach for the Stars" and, at the suggestion of a friend, invited him to apply to appear on it. He didn't win a prize, but he eventually won Nancy; they were married two years later. "Reach for the Stars" had a short life, but Nancy Horwich went on to a long career in daytime television.
The couple, whose daughter, Danielle, is a nurse at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, bought their house here in 2000, and gave up their apartment in the city three years ago.
In the late 1990s, Mr. Horwich attended a Hamptons Shakespeare Festival production of "Romeo and Juliet," and was so taken by it that he asked Josh Gladstone, the festival's co-founder, if they needed a dramaturge. he held the position for 13 years.
Asked what a dramaturge does, he shot back, "You mean 'the director's bitch' doesn't quite do it?" before explaining that the job involves making sure the actors understand what they're saying, correcting them when they make assumptions that are historically inaccurate, and more.
For several years, Mr. Horwich led a lively Shakespeare discussion group at the Amagansett Library. "The popularity of Shakespeare knows no bounds," he said. "And that was true when he was writing plays. He was clearly the best playwright in London, and he certainly became the richest." The discussion group ended with Covid, but he hopes to start it up again.
Writing academic books involved a lot of library time and a lot of research. With "10024," on the other hand, "It was wonderful to be able to just consult my memory. And if I couldn't quite remember something," he concluded with a not-really grin, "I made it up."
