Charles Baxter: Regarding Happiness (July 2008)

Why, Charles Baxter asks, is happiness such an intractable subject for treatment in extended dramatic forms, whether poetry or fiction?  While reflecting on the difficulties in writing about happiness, Baxter offers several strategies writers can use to approach the subject; he turns to Czeslaw Milosz’s “Gift,” Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” and John Cheever’s “The Worm in the Apple” for examples.