When I first met Yvor Winters 26 years ago, on my arrival as a new instructor in the Stanford English Department, he was nearly 52 years old and I was 27. I could not then have imagined that at 53 I would dare to write a little memoir about him. Although I hardly knew him, I quickly learned that he felt strongly opposed to narratives about the personal qualities of writers and that he intended to ask his correspondents not to preserve his letters. But now, ten years after his death, I have decided it would not be a betrayal of friendship to record some little-known evidence of his value as a friend and colleague.

In those first weeks I would not have dreamed that I could ever want to write sympathetically about Winters. The image of him that I had brought with me from Harvard seemed to have been accurate spiritually even though totally wrong visually. From the few of his essays that I had read, and from his reputation as a Western curmudgeon, I had expected to meet an ascetic man whose person carried as little fat as his prose. I had not yet read his splendid poem in celebration of California wines, I was surprised to find him a rotund figure with a florid complexion. One could tell even before hearing him speak lovingly about ways to cook chili or prepare escalloped potatoes that this man enjoyed good food. But his conversation was even more serious and spare than I had expected it to be, and in my anxiety as a new colleague on my first fulltime appointment I felt threatened by it. I remember very clearly that soon after his first cordial greeting at a reception for new faculty members he suddenly asked me a question about the four American historians on whose work I was writing my Ph. D. thesis: "Which one was the best?"