Twenty years ago—incredible as it I may now seem—a visitor to Atlanta, the city then boasting that it was "too busy to hate," would have found one small hotel (in the convention Mecca of the region) and only two or three restaurants to which whites and blacks were accorded equal access. That same year—1963—in that same city on the very August day in which Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed his dream from the Lincoln Memorial, a white man and two black youths were found guilty of trespassing at a Baptist church, where their lawyer repeatedly noted they had been ejected by "the hospitality committee." Still, the March on Washington constituted the high-water mark of the Civil Rights Movement and the year 1963 a milestone in its history. While the bulk of the credit for emancipating the South from Jim Crow must go to Reverend King and his followers, there was another group whose role cannot be ignored, namely, the Southern journalists who were covering and commenting upon events from May 17,1954 on. Both positively and negatively, they constituted a powerful and pervasive force in the struggle for Southern "hearts and minds." Three of those journalists—two respected as liberals and one cherished by conservatives—are the principal figures in William C. Havard's essay. The three are Hodding Carter, Jr., P. D. East, and James J. Kilpatrick, Jr. Himself a Southerner born and bred, Mr. Havard says that his piece evolved "from a long-term project on the self-interpretation of the South since the First World War, a project that fully occupies me at the moment." Although he is currently on leave, the indefatigable Mr. Havard is professor and chairman of political science at Vanderbilt University, recently co-edited (1982) with Walter Sullivan A Band of Prophets: The Agrarians after Fifty Years, and will have yet another book forthcoming next fall entitled The Recovery of Political Theory: Limits and Possibilities.

With his place in the pantheon of poets apparently established, Robert Lowell has come under increasing critical scrutiny, largely favorable, since his death in 1977; and interest in the American poet seems likely to grow with the publication of Ian Hamilton's Robert Lowell: A Biography. Thus Bruce Michelson's insightful interpretation of "Lowell versus Lowell" comes at a propitious time. A student of modern American literature, who has previously published essays on such authors as Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Wilbur, Mr Michelson is a member of the English faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his undergraduate degree from Williams College and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington and was nominated for a Fulbright Scholarship to Greece for the 1982—83 academic year.