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It is rare that the poet-turned activist survives as a poet. Adrienne Rich is am exception. In seven decisive steps from her first volume of poems to her most recent. [...]

In 1963, Wole Soyinka prepared the script and performed the narration for a television documentary, Culture in Transition, designed to introduce American audiences to Nigerian art and literature. It included [...]

In the summer of 1867 Grace King was invited to visit Charles Gayarre and his wife at their Louisiana country home 'Roncal.' A girl of fifteen, she and her sister [...]

William Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County in fifteen books and more than fifty stories. Although these individual works are autonomously coherent, they may be considered as single body. When that is [...]

When asked in a 1955 interview to name his favorite poets, William Faulkner began the list with John Keats. Keats was one of his 'old friends' whom he had Lead [...]

The phenomenon of time in Faulkner's novels, especially in The Sound and the Fury, has from the very beginning attracted critics who not only perceived its thematic relevance, but recognized [...]

Katherine Anne Porter, much to her credit, has remained the durable prima donna of Southern letters. Age has not seriously withered her nor overexplication staled her considerable variety. Doubtless the [...]

While the narrator in All the King's Men has received much critical attention, his partner in the act of communication has been rather neglected. Yet not only are the two [...]

On March 10, 1922, there appeared on the first and second pages of The Mississippian, the newspaper of the University of Mississippi, a short prose sketch entitled 'The Hill.' (1) [...]

The deliberate examination of one's own reactions as an evaluative procedure has been dormant since Pater, but after reading Daniel Hoffman's Poe, etc. I found myself unable to deal with [...]

Although Ebenezer Cooke draws heavily upon John Cotton's account of Bacon's Rebellion in composing his 'History of Colonel Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia,' as Lawrence C. Wroth has noted, (1) [...]

I The scene is vintage. As a steamer moves doggedly across Lake Leman, stopping here and there and loading and discharging passengers as it goes, two gentlemen in their later [...]

MR. J. P. DONLEAVY'S new hero for our time is George Smith, the lonely rich man who must disguise himself a thousand ways to save himself from the world and [...]

I desire that all men should see me in my simple, natural, and ordinary fashion, without straining or artiface: for it is myself that I portray.--MONTAIGNE I. Norman Podhoretz's Making [...]

IN THE END of all, the hostage, Leslie Williams, rose from the dead in full view of the audience and mocked the bells of hell that go ting-a-ling-a-ling, and in [...]

Dante could sing the circling cosmos, God's own metaphor, but the post-Einsteinian poet finds the universe without symmetry, the metaphor dissolved in free motion, the bond of spirit and matter [...]

Everything is alive. Every page bristles, quivers, stammers with the forces of organic change: even stones, metal, and lumber are seen as organisms, and they are all stubbornly and belligerently [...]

Louis MacNeice's last volume of poems, The Burning Perch, went to press in January 1963; he died suddenly in September of the same year at the age of 56. Critics [...]

These stories were no worse than the stories of talking rabbits he had been told as a boy but the talking rabbits had the charms of innocence.--The Wapshot Scandal THE [...]

But the deadly earnestness with which they lower the boom! On what? after all. On flowers. On mere flowers. Saul Bellow 1. I approach this one with more than routine [...]

I Despite the imprimatur of the National Book Award (for Nights and Days in 1967) James Merrill is too difficult and too elegant a poet to be a 'fashionable' one. [...]

I. Miss Welty when last seen, in 1955, published The Bride of the Innisfallen, her third collection of short stories (fourth if you count The Golden Apples). Thereafter, and for [...]

Despite the prevailing negative vehemence with which Norman Mailer's An American Dream * has been greeted by reviewers, it is qualitatively the most substantial of his four novels, a salutary [...]

It seems obvious now that the best young novelists in this country are nearly all connected in some way with the literary movement that has been called 'Black Humor.' Barth, [...]

WHAT comes after a poet's Collected Poems? Richard Eberhart adds to his thirty years' work in The Quarry,* his thirteenth book and one of his best. Despite the increasing honor [...]

The archetype of all fiction is the sexual act. In saying this I do not mean merely to remind the reader of the connection between all art and the erotic [...]

There is a possibility that John Barth, of Maryland by the Choptank River, may yet turn out to be that English gentleman-adventurer, Sir Charles P. Snow, who has at least, [...]

1. In Baltimore, walking in Victorian-movie snow it occurred to me: seek for the opposite. I'm for the Faustian supermarket. The opposite enthralls me. THE BOURGEOIS POET IT HAS BEEN [...]

I. Bernard Malamud's fifth and most recent novel, The Tenants, is vigorously alive. The dialogue and pace are brisk and racy; fact and fantasy combine with magical effect; the action [...]

When Thomas Wolfe was visiting New Orleans in January 1937, he recorded in a notebook in a list of people he had met there, 'Willie B. Wisdom--an autograph collector, but [...]

During the days of James Branch Cabell's celebrity, his Olympian pose of remoteness and imperturbability gave rise to an image of the writer that belied his essential shyness with people [...]

American audiences in 1915 had opportunity to see Mae Marsh play the title role of murderer-prostitute in a film version of 'The Outcast.' As undidactic as the work of Crane, [...]

After the death of his widowed mother, when he was fourteen, Walker Percy, along with his brothers Leroy and Phinizy, went to live in the home of William Alexander Percy, [...]

When William Faulkner decided to filter Section I of The Sound and the Fury through the consciousness of Benjy Compson, he took upon himself as author the extraordinary task of [...]

I. About five years before The Reivers was written, William Faulkner talked with Jean Stein in New York City, and as the interview closed, he made a comment which may [...]

William Dean Howells was one of the signers of the 'Call' for the National Negro Conference that was issued on Lincoln's birthday in 1909. On May 23, little more than [...]

Everett H. Emerson and Parke Rouse, Jr., have written admirable books about two colonial Americans whose achievements and defeats were inscribed in bold hands on the landscape of the Old [...]

I. When Philip C. Pendleton approached William Gilmore Simms in the spring of 1842 about the possibility of becoming editor of the Magnolia: or Southern Monthly, Simms found himself in [...]