This chapter by Elias Khoury, who is one of the most important living Arabic novelists and a perennial candidate for the Nobel prize in literature, is adapted from an essay first published in the cultural supplement Mulḥaq, in the Lebanese newspaper al-Nahār, in 1997. The chapter, which has as its starting point a description of Sa’dallah Wannous’ funeral as a means of explicating his significance as a playwright and public intellectual, offers a particularly vivid portrait of Wannous. It includes descriptions of Khoury’s first reading of An Evening’s Entertainment for the Fifth of June in the cultural journal al-Mawāqif in Beirut in 1968, a meeting with Wannous in Paris at Farouk Mardam-Bey’s house, and of being informed of Wannous’ premature death in 1997 on May 15, which, in the Arab world, is Nakba Day, the ‘day of catastrophe,’ when the state of Israel was created.