Louis D. Rubin

Like styles of interior decoration and ways of cutting the hair, poetic fashions change. What Thomas Stearns Eliot thought and wrote in the late 1940's and early 1950's, when as a young reader and would-be writer I was making his acquaintance, was [...]

It was in 1941, a full half-century ago, that Alfred A. Knopf published a volume by a North Carolina newspaperman, entitled The Mind of the South. Time has accorded the book by Wilbur Joseph Cash, known as "Jack" to his associates, a kind of class [...]

Everybody—well, almost everybody—is willing to concede that there is such a thing as Southern literature, by which is meant that which, when present in a work of imaginative writing, links that work with the particular region of the United Sta [...]

Thomas Wolfe and the South was the subject of the first essay on Southern literature I published, almost a quarter-century ago. In that essay I went about demonstrating, or attempting to demonstrate, that Wolfe was indubitably a Southern writer, as [...]

I think it is not without importance that the all-night restaurant in Carson McCuller's first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, is called The New York Cafe. In the small-sized Southern city in the late 1930's, when the story takes place, there is [...]

1.The Boll Weevil On hot afternoons in the summertime—this was in the middle-to-late 1930's—I sat in the bleachers at College Park in Charleston and when the baseball game was not too interesting I watched for the Boll Weevil at the Seaboard Air [...]

Of the major American spectator sports, the game of baseball is probably the most "intellectual." By this I do not mean that the average baseball fan is a metaphysician or a college professor, since the truth is that as such things go, baseball pro [...]

From the top of the ferris wheel at Folly Beach you could see a long way in all directions, up the beach to where it was woodland along the shore and beyond that the black and white rings of Morris Island lighthouse tower, northward to the flat mar [...]

It can be argued that the greatest mistake made by the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II, apart from giving Austria-Hungary the blank check that turned what might have been a localized dispute into a catastrophic world war, was the decision to build a H [...]

Once upon a time, many long years ago, I was invited to take part in an American Studies graduate seminar at the University of Pennsylvania, on the topic of Values in American Civilization. Where, the question was raised at the opening session, wo [...]

I think that Fred Hobson has provided us, in his excellent biography of H. L. Mencken (Mencken: A Life, 1994), with a very useful insight into the Sage of Baltimore as journalist when he notes, of his immersion in newspaper work that "he would alw [...]

[Who] Could by industrious valor climb To ruin the great work of Time, And cast the kingdom old Into another mold. . . . Marvell, Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland Writers of history have always been good at secon [...]

In the space of just over five years, from 1930 to 1935, we moved nine times. During that period I lived in seven different neighborhoods and attended five different schools. I remember how it felt to be taken to a new school, escorted to a classro [...]