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Edwin M. Yoder Jr.

Edwin M. Yoder Jr. is a native of Greensboro, North Carolina, educated at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and Oxford University, England, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has worked for newspapers in North Carolina and Washington, DC, where he was associate editor and editorial page editor of the Washington Star (1975-1981). He won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 1979. From 1991 to 2002 he was professor of Journalism and humanities at Washington and Lee University. He was a regular contributor to Book World, the book supplement of the Washington Post.

Author

A New Kind of History

Lincoln in American Memory. By Merrill D. Peterson. Oxford. $30. In The Jefferson Image in the American Mind 36 years ago, Merrill Peterson patented what was, in effect, a new kind of history—the history of a great reputation. At least, he could [...]

Faulkner and Race: Art and Punditry

A curious silence has thus far greeted the centenary of William Faulkner, born in New Albany, Mississippi in the autumn of 1897.By any accounting, he was the most distinguished American storyteller of the century; and it is astonishing still to rec [...]

The Princess Casamassima Revisited

The republication of Henry James' only explicitly political novel, The Princess Casamassima, in the Library of America invites a timely rethinking of its troubled reputation. From the first it has been viewed, even by its author, as a problem nove [...]

The Big Three

Autumn 1988 | Criticism

Merrill Peterson's subject in this detailed and masterly study is the "intermediate" generation that followed the founders of the republic. Their ascendancy extended from the era of the War of 1812 to the eve of the civil war they labored in vain to prevent.

The Sage At Sunset

Winter 1982 | Criticism

The publication on Independence Day 1981 of the concluding volume of Dumas Malone's great Jefferson biography has inspired almost as much celebration of the author as reflection on the post-presidential years of his great subject. That is fitting. We prize gallantry where we find it. And there is gallantry in Malone's splendid conquest of what Mr. Jefferson himself called the tedium senectutem: the weariness of age.