A colleague passed along a link to an eNotes.com list of “the top ten most manly writers ever,” and apart from a shoutout to Cormac McCarthy, the list is just as banal and unsurprising as you’d expect it to be. Ernest Hemingway? Yep. Jack London? Sure. Norman Mailer? Check. And then there’s Jack Kerouac, “a voracious connoisseur of life who didn’t easily take ‘no’ for an answer.” The person who sent me the list was unconvinced, and honestly, even if he did play high school football and served in the merchant marines, I’m not sold either. Do you think he outranks, oh, Mark Twain, or Lord Byron, or B. Traven, or Iceberg Slim? Hell, George Plimpton, a man who gamely put himself in harm’s way time and again for the sake of a good story, could probably knock Kerouac off that list without breaking a sweat.