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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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Once he became established, magazine editors bought everything John William Fox, Jr. (1862 or 1863-1919), offered them. Library patrons wore out successive editions of his books. White House doors swung [...]

Harlem's Countee Cullen, with three volumes of poetry and an anthology to his credit, could be sure the readers of his literary page shared the sentiments he expressed after a [...]

Jefferson the President, First Term 1801-1805, by Dumas Malone. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. $10.00. Thomas Jefferson: A Well-Tempered Mind, by Carl Binger. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970. $6.95. A [...]

How to kill your man in a duel.--Take a rusty old gun which you think is not loaded--let it go off accidentally in the direction of the other man with [...]

Writing of Ebenezer Cooke's The Sot-weed Factor in 1934, Lawrence Wroth, whose bibliographical researches remain indispensable for the student of colonial American literature and culture, praised the vividness with which [...]

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 [...]

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 Jealously as he defended the privacy he considered his birthright, William Faulkner made his writing life an open book. He loved to tell tall tales about it, but left [...]

In 1970 Eudora Welty published her first lengthy novel and, in many respects, her first serious one. Although it has been followed by yet another novel, Losing Battles will be [...]

Flannery O'Connor remarked in one of the composite pieces included in Mystery and Manners: 'It's always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand [...]

J. A. Leo Lemay's Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland is an important book about early American writing and the culture that produced it. Though it focuses upon a single [...]

EDITOR'S NOTE--the interview with Walker Percy that follows was conducted by Professor Nagy, of the faculty of Kossuth University, Debrecen, Hungary, with a view toward publication in Hungary. Because many [...]

William Faulkner has constructed in his fiction the most complex and detailed time system of any American author. His fictional Yoknapatawpha County appears in novel after novel with striking congruity [...]

Discussions of Look Homeward, Angel frequently assume that the narrator is essentially an older and more eloquent (or verbose) Eugene Gant. Such discussions see the novel as beginning with 'the [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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) [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A. R. Ammons, who was born in 1926 in Columbus County, North Carolina, reached the summit of his career when his big Collected Poems: 1951-1971 was received with admiration and [...]

Whenever a writer commits himself publicly to a position of theological dogma, he can expect a certain predictable mode of critical analysis to be applied to his work. And when [...]

The critics of John Peale Bishop's Act of Darkness seem to have been compelled strangely to qualify their praise of the story by cavilling at its technique. Relying on the [...]

The letters read like the scenario of a film designed for educational television. The time is 1908. The place is Cape Cod, amid the summer colony at Marion, Massachusetts. Almost [...]

On July 5, 1726, William Byrd II of Westover, recently returned to Virginia after a ten year stay in England for what he hoped would be a brief 'Pilgrimage into [...]

It is doubtful that any two-way correspondence could satisfy totally the scholarly curiosity about the Fugitive-Agrarians, which began with a master's thesis in 1936 (according to these letters of two [...]

The publication of The Letters of William Gilmore Simms (1952-56) was a milestone in the serious study of Simms in recent times. In reviewing these letters C. Hugh Holman (American [...]

Early in November 1844, William Gilmore Simms accepted the editorship of a proposed new magazine from Burges and James, the Charleston publishers. In spite of his misgivings about the name [...]

We cannot read Joseph Blotner's lengthy, highly detailed, and completely frank biography of William Faulkner without experiencing some feeling of guilt. This is not because we find ourselves to be [...]

There has been a need for an account of Mark Twain and the South. Consider the fact that we already have been given books on Mark Twain and Hawaii, Mark [...]

Although Ebenezer Cooke must rank as one of the most accomplished American satirists before Benjamin Franklin, if not indeed as Franklin's most talented predecessor, you will scarcely find him mentioned [...]

A year prior to the publication of Night Rider (1989), Warren was working on the materials which eventually became All the King's Men. Among the many elements which shaped the [...]

By critical consensus, Robert Beverley's History and Present State of Virginia (London, 1705) (1) deserves to be ranked as a 'minor but genuine American classic,' (2) not only because of [...]

'The past is never dead. It's not even past,' says Gavin Stevens in Requiem for a Nun, and therewith summarizes the basic dilemma that confronts many of William Faulkner's characters, [...]

When William Styron's first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), appeared, reviewers and critics were quick to notice the similarities between that novel and Faulkner's work, particularly The Sound and [...]

Many critics of William Gilmore Simms rate Woodcraft, his novel about Captain Porgy's return to the plantation after the Revolution, as his best literary achievement. (1) Woodcraft, however, has not [...]