As an essayist and novelist, writer Ben Fountain was an unlikely choice to pen a monthly column about the 2016 presidential election for the British newspaper, The Guardian. He’d never worked as a journalist, and although he’s passionate about U.S. politics, he had never written about a presidential election.
But following Donald Trump, both on the campaign trail and in his Guardian column, allowed Fountain to dig deep into that particular moment of our society, leading him to declare that we have entered what he calls the country’s “third existential crisis,“ after the struggle over slavery and the Great Depression. Fountain joined us in February for the David P. Gardner Lecture, thanks to an invitation from the Tanner Humanities Center.
