ISSUE: Winter 1942
Southern Review, has often contributed to the Virginia Quarterly. His novel, “Night Rider,” won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship prize for 1989.
As the writer of the most widely syndicated Southern newspaper column, and as editor, lecturer, and author, John Temple Graves has won the reputation of being “one of the ablest, most liberal, and best informed men about our Southern economic problem.” He has been a member of the editorial staff of the Birmingham Age-Herald since 1929. In 1919 he was assistant to Edward N. Hurley on the American Peace Commission at Paris. In recent years he has organized two successful campaigns: one to combat the discrimination in the price of steel against Southern industrialists, and the other to obtain greater representation for the South in the Democratic National Conventions.
Helen Hill is the executive director of the National Policy Committee in Washington, D. C. She is the editor and author of many volumes on economics, agriculture, and foreign trade, and is also the author of a biography of George Mason, the great constitutionalist. Her two most recent books arc: “Beyond German Victory” (with Herbert Agar) and “America’s Maginot Lines.” She has long been a valued contributor to the Virginia Quarterly.
“I hope no one takes this story to be a wailing over Greece,” writes Peter Gray concerning “Threnody for Stelios”; “for Greece is not dead, and needs help now, not wailing. . . . The peasant funeral customs arc striking in their frank expressions of grief—so much more hon-est than the American tendency to hush up the matter, to avoid even the word Mcath’ and pretend that nothing has happened—and in their relation to the pagan religion. The conception of death as a wedding, an important clement in the old mysteries, is still held to in present day wailing, and a young girl is dressed for burial in a white veil and wedding gown.” Peter Gray was introduced to Virginia Quarterly readers in the Winter, 1941, issue. He is at present engaged in writing a non-fictional book on Greece.
William Schack began his writing career as a schoolboy by winning an essay
prize of fifty cents. Before publishing a book, however, he spent a number of years in doing research in colloid chemistry, in editing trade journals, in reviewing plays for The New York Times, and in four years’ travel in Europe and the Near East. Meanwhile he had been contributing verse and prose to some twenty different magazines and “somewhere along the line,” he says, he became an art critic. In 1939 he published “And He Sat among the Ashes,” a biography of Louis M. Eilshemius. The present essay, which is about wrong and right ways of criticizing art, marks his first appearance in the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Edwin Mims, Jr., who makes his first contribution to the Virginia Quarterly with his review in this issue, is now Pro-fessor of American History at Sarah Lawrence College. His most recent volume is “The Majority of the People,” published last winter. Archibald A. Hill, Profes- sor of English and English Philology at the University of Virginia, has contributed literary and philological articles to many magazines, including the Virginia Quarterly. He is a member of the consulting board of the Thorndyke Century Senior Dictionary and is the editor of and one of the contributors to the recently published volume, “Humanistic Studies in Honor of John Calvin Metcalf.” SiGmund Neu- mann is the distinguished author of many volumes in both German and English; among his most recent in the latter language are “The Sowing of Versailles” and “Revolution for What?” He is Professor of Political Science at Wesleyan Univer- sity in Connecticut. Francis P. Gaines is President of Washington and Lee Univer- sity. He is the author of “The Southern Plantation” and of “Lee—The Final , Achievement.” The verse of the distin- guished poet, Babette Deutsch, has often appeared in the Virginia Quarterly. She is at present writing a novel about Francois Villon to be entitled “Rogue’s Legacy” and published in the spring. Her recent biography, “Walt Whitman—Builder for America,” is being translated into both Spanish and Portuguese.
Between 1927 and 1941, Dexter Per- kins has written four volumes concerning the Monroe Doctrine, the latest being j
