An excerpt on this professor form UCLA's English department website:

"Along the way, Professor Maniquis has been a shoe-shine boy, a gang member, a boy scout, a dishwasher, a golf caddie, a bowling alley pinboy, a grave digger, a coffin polisher, a hamburger slinger, an automobile worker, a plumber's assistant a human subject in band-aid experiments, a lab assistant charged with brushing hamster's teeth, an organist in a Baptist church, a truck driver, a foreman on an Oregon blackberry farm, an assistant to a private detective, a dialogue coach for several films, a script doctor, a private tutor to the fabulously rich, a translator, and the producer of orchestral music for a silent film."

Unsurprisingly, Professor Maniquis is a mysterious man who makes his free-floating lectures consistently fascinating. The richness of his experience certainly colors the method of his teaching, which can be described as stern but highly constructive. He constantly challenges you intellectually, drawing not just from personal experience but from the absolute breadth of history and culture he has read and watched in his lifetime. I cannot even imagine how vast the extent of his knowledge is. I echo the sentiment of other reviewers, that he is an "old school" professor. If you are like me, and believe the study of literature has been bogged down by increasingly esoteric and politically-charged theoretical approaches, then being "old school," being traditional, is a virtue. Overall, he will deepen your appreciation for literature and increase your curiosity for life and for thought, and I highly recommend his classes.