During PW's interview with essayist Sam Pickering, he blows on an Oscar Meyer weiner whistle, runs upstairs to show me the "ugliest neckties [he] has ever seen," and laughs so hard that he leans back against the couch and lifts both feet in the air. He rarely answer questions directly, but begins with a story in his Southern drawl, "My daddy once told me..." or "a friend said to me the other day," similar to the tone in his collections of essays. He rambles around an idea that strikes him as he's taking a walk over the enormous University of Connecticut farmlands or teaching a class in essay writing or children's literature. Ideas like "What if someone celebrated their birthday on their due date?" or "What if someone collected obituaries and then changed them slightly, giving people what they missed?" Pickering, who has published over a dozen books of essays, several academic books on children's literature and almost 60 academic articles, has two new books out: Waltzing the Magpies, a memoir about one of his sabbaticals in Australia; and The Best of Pickering, a selection of previously published essays. "The problem with titling it The Best of Pickering," he says, laughing, "is it opens the possibility for someone to say, 'If this is the best of Pickering, I shudder to think what is the worst.' "

In May of 2004, Booklist wrote about Pickering, "Few essayists can distill the world's vagaries with as deft a hand." Professor Jay Parini compares Pickering's essays to E.B. White and James Thurber and thinks "the moment has come for him to have a wider circle." Although his career is impressive and varied—he's a full professor at the University of Connecticut with an M.A. from Cambridge ("For Southerners, Britain is our spiritual home," he says) and a Ph.D. from Princeton; he's held Fulbright lectureship in Jordan, Syria and Australia; and he's lectured at 40 different universities—he is self-deprecating about his intellect and ambition in both his essays and in person. "The only ambition I ever had," he says in an interview at his home in Storrs "is to be a daddy." Jay Parini attributes his intellectual modesty to the anti-intellectualism of the South. "Sam made a semi-conscious decision to turn his back on the academic world and develop the persona in the essays. It is an invention." In one of his essays, Pickering proudly flaunts his lack of prestige when he recalls his young daughter asking him, "Daddy, why don't you get an invitation to the president?" to which his son responds, "Dad's not important."

Despite his astoundingly prolific career as a writer, Pickering never wrote or had ambitions to write when he was younger, but spent summers on his grandfather's farm in Virginia catching things like frogs, lizards and cicadas. Catching requires looking and that is what he does during his country walks where things he sees set him off on a path for an essay. Growing up in Nashville in the '50s with his homemaker mother and a father who worked in the Traveler's insurance company, he did very well in high school and was pursued by universities on the East Coast. However, his father thought he should stay in the South and also suggested he major in English so he could then go into business, "I did what daddy told me to," he says. He studied so hard at the University of the South, Sewanee, he got the nickname "the machine." When his father commented to him that he had become a bookworm, he challenged that opinion by promptly spending a week at Mardi Gras with Miss New Orleans as his date. But after college, he knew he wanted to get away. "I was an only child. My mother carried twins after me and lost them in a tubal pregnancy. If I had had brothers and sisters, if not so much loving attention was paid to me—I wouldn't really call it smothering—I would have stayed in Nashville." The South, he explains, puts a great emphasis on obligation. "I was always nice and [if] my parents said, 'Sammy, take out Little Janey,' I would, but if you held hands with little Janey, you would probably never leave." The only pressure ever put on him was to be social and kind: "The best we can do is to make people feel good," his mother told him.

He has mastered that quality because his students adore him and he packs them into his classes. He is passionate, laughing loudly and easily, so excited by conversation that he constantly interrupts himself with another idea. When asked about his flamboyant teaching style, he says, "My mother was extravagant and I take after her." His energy is high and he seems able to bring it with him semester after semester. "We are in our genes," he says, "and I'm not a person to be moody."

Pickering's first essay, about his love of libraries, was published in the Dartmouth Library Bulletin when he taught there. It brought a stream of letters, which made him realize he could reach people through essays. Later, he received four marriage proposals after writing a story in Yankee Magazine about "a turtle of a man hoping to find a turtle of a woman." He made himself a deal that he would allow himself to work on one essay for every two academic articles. But the ratio started shifting until he was only writing essays. His persona in his essays is genial and approachable, and his style of wondering invites readers to respond. But what changed him from an essayist with an appreciative audience to a public speaker with an international reputation was the 1989 film Dead Poets Society.

The prep school teacher played by Robin Williams was identified as being modeled after Pickering by the screenwriter Tommy Schulman, a former student of Pickering's at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville. Pickering taught high school for only one year and feels perturbed that the publicity from the film has continued for 15. "It was a nice movie, and it probably helped sell my books," he says, acknowledging that it made him a more attractive package, gave people a handle into a book and a personality. Agents tried to court him, sending gifts including the book Matilda for his daughter. He was approached by someone who wanted him to sign an advertising deal and even had stalkers (he prefers to call them "the infatuated"). He was inundated with calls asking him to speak, most often on pedagogic theories. "I'm a really good public speaker. I make them laugh, I make them cry," he says, "but I don't get a lot of satisfaction from it." As for pedagogic theories, he says he has none. "I just cope with what comes up and I like my students."

The year after Dead Poets came out, he made $22,000 in talks, articles and royalties; after the publicity died down, that fell to around $6,000 or $7,000.

After the initial whirlwind, he rejected a lot of opportunities relating to the film, believing that using it to hustle his own career would be vulgar, but it has been hard to escape. When he speaks today, the first question he is usually asked is about the film. "I try not to look chagrined," he says.

The film was fiction except for Pickering's unusual style of teaching, which included leaping onto desks to recite poetry or standing with his students on a soccer field and reciting verse before giving the ball a kick. His friends still tease him about those scenes in the movie, saying, "Sam, could you say that again, but from the top of your desk?"

The film's main theme is carpe diem, which Pickering says many kids mistakenly interpret as fast cars and sexual abandon. But for him, carpe diem means walking out into the sunlight of his backyard or in his summer home in Nova Scotia and noticing bugs and flowers. In his essays, he observes the domestic details of the day. He takes as his subject what some would overlook: buying sneakers for his son or cataloguing the bureaucracies of college admissions. He is restrained, spelling out the word S-E-X as if not wanting to offend anyone. He holds back, as in an essay in which he describes finding his parents' love letters in a jewelry box and leaving them unread because of his sense of their privacy. This contrasts with the passionate man who is fascinated by almost anything, who picks huge bouquets of flowers for his wife and sends his boys snakeskins in the mail, who teaches Hamlet in Syria while terrorists are striking outside the classroom and attacks illogical, bureaucratic rules like Don Quixote on his horse. Parini believes these contrasting sides of Pickering create tension in his essays: "Sam brings a strangely contradictory figure, a kind of repressed Anglophile who is ready to break loose and set the house on fire, the British streak with the Dionysian."

Although he includes his family in many of his essays, he doesn't pillage family and friends for stories and characters for his art. "I would never tell personal things about my children. I don't want to hurt anybody," he says. People come up to him often and tell him something awful and then suggest he write about it. But he doesn't understand that kind of impulse. "We are in an age of confessional things, it's a kind of gimmick." He refers to an essay he read in which the author described what he and his former wife did in private. "I don't mean to be crude," he says, "but how could you possible do that?" After hearing another publisher say to him about Waltzing the Magpies, "Nothing much happens, there isn't a lot of sex." He replied, "That's right. It's about a middle-aged man drinking cappuccino and studying flowers."

Pickering's publishing career has been a smooth one. All his books have been published by university presses. Although he was approached by agents, he wasn't interested, choosing rather to send out his own work, feeling that was part of the experience. Charles Backis (now head of Texas A & M Press, but then at University Press of New England) was the first to ask for a book-size collection of essays. Pickering obliged and it was accepted immediately and entitled AContinuing Education. He stayed with academic publishers liking the simplicity of no agent, no publicist. "I am a retiring person," he says, not enchanted with the idea of a book tour or photo shoot. He even wrote one essay about a disastrous seat-of-the-pants book tour he did for one of his collections where he split the cost with the publisher. He understands now that academic publishers' biggest disadvantage is that their books aren't found in all the bookstores, so even if he gets a little publicity, if readers don't find the book immediately, they will settle for something else. All of the manuscripts he's sent out have been responded to within weeks. He never stayed with the same press because his books never made much money, and he felt too guilty to ask them to risk another of his books.

Pickering has broken the pattern of going with an academic press with a book called Letters to a Teacher, which will come out with Grove Atlantic. Nat Sobel, an agent with Weber Associates, approached Pickering, and when he accepted, Sobel sent the manuscript to Grove Atlantic, which took it right away. With two kids in college and one just out, Pickering would like to see more financial gain. For his recent two books, Michigan University Press came to him with a two-book deal. "They're so pretty," he says of the glossy hard covers with photos of the author. "Maybe they'll earn a little money."

At 62, Pickering continues to write prolifically and stroll leisurely. He has just finished another collection of essays entitled A Brown Bird Sang in the Apple Tree, but doesn't think yet about where it will end up.