George Garrett

1 1) OPENING - DAY FADE IN: We see CLOSE UP a large male hand, flexing. Then both hands, the other one gloved with a white glove, appear. The white glove is drawn over the bare hand. The loud shrill SOUND of a police whistle. Now we see the hands [...]

The main burden of Henry Hart's recently published James Dickey: The World as a Lie (Picador, $35), coming to the reading public after eight years of intensive research and investigation, is two-fold: to set a highly inaccurate record straight, and [...]

Now it is a matter of memory, but then it was an experience. Not simply a memorable event, but an experience lived in and through and worth remembering, one of those rare occurences which, even after all is said and done, modified and revised by time [...]

Strength stoops unto the grave, Worms feed on Hector brave, Swords may not fight with fate. Earth still holds ope her gate; Come! come! the bells do cry. I am sick, I must die. Lord have mercy on us! Thomas Nashe—"Song" Seeing is be [...]

I came to reading and writing more or less naturally. As, for example, you might come to swimming early and easily. Which, matter of fact, I did; learning to swim at about the same time I learned to walk. I can very well remember the name of the ma [...]

This being part of a letter, written in the spring of 1626 by Sir Robert Carey (newly made Earl of Monmouth) and addressed to his old friend—Sir Ferdinando Gorges. A letter from one old man to another. Both of them survivors of the age of Elizabe [...]

"Damage Them All You Can:" Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, by George Walsh. Tom Doherty Associates. $24.95 "It don't hurt a bit to be shot in a wooden leg." —Lt. Gen Richard S. Ewell, CSA It's no surprise that we have a multitu [...]

Most of the important things about the place of place in fiction have been said before and said better by my betters. And so it is probably outrageous, bad form all around, to write about place again, to try to recapitulate the persuasive arguments [...]

When Staige Blackford took charge as editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) in 1975, he followed directly behind the distinguished Charlotte Kohler, who had edited the magazine, first as its managing editor, then as editor, since 1942. Hers [...]

The History of Southern Women's Literature. Edited by Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks. L.S.U. Press. $49.95. (Southern Literary Studies, Fred Hobson, Editor). Surely a number of readers of The Virginia Quarterly Review will remember Adlai S [...]

Collected Poems. By Elder Olson. University of Chicago Press, $6.50. Collected Poems 1919–1962. By Babette Deutsch. Indiana University Press, $4.50. One of the conventions of the current literary scene is that when a poet offers a volume called [...]

Now chaos has pitched a tent in my pasture, a kind of circus tent like a tan toadstool in the land of giants. O all night long the voices of the damned and saved keep me awake and, basso, the evangelist. Fire & brimstone, thunder & lightning, [...]

"After all," Jane said, "it is my own money. It isn't as if I were taking anything away from you or the children." Her husband sighed and shrugged, wounded by misapprehension and misunderstanding. They were in the kitchen having breakfast, a white [...]

That was the summer my cousin Harry came to live with us. We weren't going anywhere that summer because the war was on. Harry's father had to have a serious operation and go all the way to Baltimore to have it. He would be in the hospital a long time [...]

I do not know very much about rich people. I have been among them sometimes and was always more or less accepted because I was Southern and it was all right to be Southern and poor if your ancestors had been Southern and rich. Still, I find them very [...]