The Green Room, Spring 1976

THROUGHOUT the 20th century, the United States has pursued two diverging goals in foreign policy. On the one hand it has sought stability and the status quo, and on the other it has sought, in Wilson’s words, to “make the world safe for democracy,” This search for an orderly yet democratic and free world has long concerned Norman A. Graebner, Edward R. Stettinius Professor of Modern American History at the University of Virginia. “I early developed the thesis that in any successful foreign policy there must be a close association of ends ‘and means,” Mr. Graebner writes. “It is my belief that a nation’s foreign policy cannot operate effectively beyond the range of its clearly perceived interests. Even against a rather minor enemy, the absence of clearly demonstrated interests in Southeast Asia doomed American policy there from the very beginning.” Mr. Graebner is on leave from Virginia this year at Pennsylvania State University, directing what he considers to be “a very successful program on the Bicentennial under the general theme of Freedom: Then, Now, and Tomorrow.” In his 25-year teaching career, Mr. Ghaebner has taught at Ohio State University, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois. His books include Empire on the Pacific, The New Isolationism, Cold War Diplomacy, and Ideas and Diplomacy.

Thomas Wolfe has never really been accepted as part of the Southern literary establishment. Yet, as Louis D. Rubin, Jr. notes, Wolfe was as much a part of the South as the Great Smokies and piney woods of his native North Carolina. Mr. Rubin is University Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His latest book, William Elliott Shoots a Bear: Essays on the Southern Literary Imagination, has just been published by Louisiana State University Press. He is the author and editor of numerous other books, including The Faraway County, Writers of the Modern South, The Golden Weather: A Novel, The Writer in the South: Studies in a Literary Community, and Southern Renaissance: The Literature of the Modern South.

The clash between Arabs and Israelis has long been a steady staple of the Cronkite-Chancellor news diet, but most Americans are less familiar with the Arab-Israeli attempts to sway American opinion in this country. This is particularly so, as Mary A. Bahberis notes, in the case of the Arabs. Miss Barberis worked on Capitol Hill while also attending the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, specializing in American foreign policy and international economics. After receiving her M. A. degree last spring, she moved to London, where she is now working as a free lance writer.

One of the victims of the “Battle of Algiers” in 1957 was a young mathematics instructor named Maurice Audin. His mysterious disappearance and death became a cause célèbre in France. John Talbott encountered the Audin case in the course of research on a book about France and the Algerian war. He teaches modern European history at the University of California at Santa Barbara but is spending this year as a visiting member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Mr. Talbott is the author of The Politics of Educational Reform in France, 1918—1940.

Anne Williams Ferguson began her literary career as editor of the school newspaper (“called, of course, “The Chatham Chat” “). After graduating from Chatham, Mrs. Ferguson recalls, “To my family’s horror the only college I wanted to attend was Sarah Lawrence. So I went, and spent the next three years compounding the horror by joining labor unions, the ADA, and picketing the McCarthy hearings. At the end of my Junior year, I did exactly what I hadn’t intended: Married a New Orleans man. . . . My husband died in 1967, and I fled what I choose to refer to as “that hot-bed of feverish lethargy” [New Orleans] to San Francisco almost immediately. And became almost an Instant Journalist. After all, ladies do not write for publication in New Orleans— unless your name happens to be Lillian Hellman.”

Alan Spiegel is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His article is a condensed version of a chapter from his forthcoming book, Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel (University Press of Virginia). Mr. Spiegel says his interest in film began at age 3 when his father took him to see Sabu in The Thief of Bagdad and his interest in the relationships between film and literature at 18 when he read Ulysses. Mr. Spiegel is currently at work on a book-length study of style and form in the American cinema.

Anne Hobson Freeman is a housewife, mother, and teacher of creative writing. Her own creativity embraces both poems and short stories.

Malovika Mukerji is a 21-year-old native of India who has published poetry in The Illustrated Weekly of India and Western Humanities Review. She is now on a fellowship at Louisiana State University. She describes her poems as being “about things that affect me as a girl growing up in post-partition India: combating with the shadows of the British Raj, coping with the jolts that the poverty around gives to one’s youthful idealism.”

Robert McDermott works for the economic development agency of the Irish Government in New York City. He says the reason he writes poetry “has something to do with Seamus Heaney and admiration for his work.”

Elisabeth Murawski Evans reports that she was first encouraged to write poems by a New York literary agent some 15 years ago. “Flipping entirely too rapidly over my short stories,” she recalls, “he landed on a poem. “This,” he said, “has potential. Write 200 more of these and we’ll do a book. “”

A native of Fredericksburg, Virginia, Alice Adams grew up in Chapel Hill and graduated from Radcliffe. She now lives in San Francisco. Her critically acclaimed second novel, Families and Survivors, was published in hardback last year and has recently been republished in paperback. Her short stories have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and six of them have appeared in O. Henry collections. She is now working on a third novel.

Glenn F. Jackson is a graduate of the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and an award-winning short story writer. He has also written for television.

A specialist in modern and contemporary literature, David E. Gates is writing his dissertation on Donald Barthelme at the University of Connecticut and is a visiting lecturer at the University of Virginia for the current academic year.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Vircinius Dabney is Editor Emeritus of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He is the author of many books, including Virginia: The New Dominion, which is now in its sixth printing. MR. DABNEY edited the Bicentennial volume, The Patriots, published last year by Atheneum, and Double-day will publish his history of Richmond next fall.

A Harvard-educated psychiatrist, Robert Coles was first exposed to Mississippi while serving as an Air Force officer in Biloxi. He received the 1972 Lillian Smith Award for distinguished writing about the South for Volumes II and III of his work on underprivileged children in America, Children of Crisis. The book he reviews, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, won the Lillian Smith Award for 1975.

David Wyatt, a graduate of Yale and Berkeley, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, where he is writing a book on the reader in American literature.

A retired Foreign Service officer, Smith Simson served on four of five continents during his long diplomatic career. His discussion of The China Hands raises some points not hitherto considered in reviews of the book. A native Virginian, he has served overseas at posts ranging from Brussels, Belgium, to Bombay, India. He is the author of Anatomy of the State Department and editor of Resources and Needs of American Diplomacy.

Kenneth G. Crawford joined Newsweek magazine as a war correspondent in 1943 and covered the fighting in North Africa and Italy before participating in the D-Day landings and going on to cover the subsequent combat in France. From 1944 until 1970 he was a Washington correspondent and political columnist for Newsweek. He is now a syndicated newspaper columnist.

A specialist in Southern history, Charles B. Dew teaches at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Robert A. Rutland is editor of The Papers of James Madison and served as an historical consultant for Time magazine’s special issue last year on the Bicentennial.

William B. O’neal is a Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Virginia, who has long been an inveterate reviewer of books.