Stealing From the Greats

When my father was in North Africa during World War II, he asked his mother to send him the complete works of Shakespeare. He carried the volume she sent him throughout the war.

It didn’t save his life — as in all those (probably apocryphal) stories about a Bible in a breast pocket blocking a bullet — but it did help him keep his sanity in a world gone mad.

In my childhood, that same volume sat between bookends on top of a bookcase in our living room. I discovered it when I was about eleven.

I’d...