THE American emphasis on self-reliance necessitates the refusal to be involved in time." So observes Quentin Anderson at the outset of his essay on four 19th-century American writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Henry James. In his discussion of property and vision in America as seen by four of its major literary figures, Mr. Anderson drew upon a lifetime of learning that began in higher education at Dartmouth College and continued at Columbia University, where he received his doctoral degree and where he has been a member of the faculty since 1939. Both a student and teacher of American literature, Mr. Anderson is the author of numerous works, including The American Henry James, The Proper Study, and The Imperial Self, which appeared in 1971. His essay, he writes, "is a first step in an attempt to explain what constrained Americans to claim so much for the self."

"The Pedagogy of Love" by Redding S. Sugg, Jr. is adapted from a chapter of his Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education, which the University Press of Virginia will publish next fall. A freelance writer living in Memphis, he has published articles in periodicals ranging from the scholarly to the general, including American Heritage, Atlanta, Smithsonian, and the South Atlantic Quarterly. The short story writer and novelist, Ann Beattie, read Thomas W. Molyneux's story, "Visiting the Point," shortly after it was submitted to VQR last year and pronounced it the best story she had seen come into the magazine during her two-and-a-half year stint as a VQR fiction reader. Tragically, Ms. Beattie made her pronouncement on the very day it was learned that Mr. Molyneux had died suddenly in Delaware, where he was a young member of the English faculty of the University of Delaware. Great teachers shed a light that shines on in the minds and memories of their students long after the classroom association has ended. Two such teachers are discussed in this issue. One was the Harvard historian, Frederick Merk; the other was Stanford's literary legend, Ivor Winters. Mr. Merk, who died last year at age 90 and whose last book will be published by Knopf this summer, is recalled by his former pupil, John Morton Blum. Mr. Winters is remembered by one of his former colleagues in the Stanford English Department, David Levin.