Table of Contents
Dramatis Personae

Please note that characters are added as they reveal themselves and become part of the story. 

The Melancholy Korean is a writer and former derivatives trader living in New York.  He loves Dante, James Joyce and Flaubert.  He loves Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Edith Wharton, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Cavafy, Ezra Pound, Nabokov, Leopardi, Chesterton, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Capote, Anthony Powell.  He knows Greek, Latin, and Italian.  He has studied French, German, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Hebrew, but of these languages, he remembers only, "avez-vous un cendrier?"  Yes, he smokes.  No, he doesn't know Korean.

Leon Badges is a painter, illustrator, draftsman, and cartoonist.  A visual artist extraordinaire, lover of women, and all-around madman, he is Melancholy's oldest friend.  They met in fourth grade and have been accomplices ever since.

Felicity

Barbara, Felicity's Mother

Harry Best

Prune

Dr. Ken Coffin

Broker Bill and his wife Kate

Nicky, the Greek

Blue Stocking

Rev Hezekiah Bartholomew Smith

Kitty

Marco

The Critic

Sybil

Schedule

Melancholy takes approximately 16 weeks of vacation each year.

Vacation Status:  at work, in New York.

Friends
Full Serial Archive
Copybook Archive
Fashion Diary Archive
Comments Archive
Reading List Archive

Please note the following lists are dynamic and not intended to be comprehensive.

For Critics and other Interested Parties

Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows

David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross

Dante, Vita Nuova

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Araby, The Dead

Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, The Razor's Edge, The Moon and Sixpence

Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning"

Tennyson, "Ulysses" 

Byron, "She Walks in Beauty"

Giacomo Leopardi, "L'infinito"

Tomasi di Lampedusa, La Sirena

Alexander Theroux, The Lollipop Trollops and Other Poems

Ford Maddox Ford, Parade's End

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time

Works Cited

José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians

Photo credits

COACD