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The Green Room, Spring 1978


ISSUE:  Spring 1978

Now, nearly 15 years since that dreadful day in Dallas, the “fleeting wisp of glory” that was known as Camelot-on-the-Potomac has vanished into the mists of memory. And the legend that was John F. Kennedy is not holding up too well in the glare of reality. In the view of Thomas G. Paterson, this is particularly true of Kennedy’s foreign policy. In fact, Mr. Paterson concludes, after a penetrating and provocative examination of that policy, the New Frontiersman was “not only a maker of history but a victim of it.” A professor of history at the University of Connecticut, Mr. Paterson received his B. A. degree from the University of New Hampshire and his M. A. and Ph. D. degrees from the University of California. He is a specialist in diplomatic history and particularly in the history of the Cold War. He is the author of Soviet-American Confrontation: Postwar Reconstruction and the Origins of the Cold War and editor of American Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. An earlier version of his VQR article was given as a lecture at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The University of Connecticut Research Foundation provided funds for travel to the John F. Kennedy Library, where Mr. Paterson did much of his research for the essay.

Peter Taylor is one of the nation s fore-most practitioners of the short story. Yet, as Jonathan Yardley contended in his 1977 Washington Post review of Mr. Taylor’s latest book, In the Miro District, this short story writer is vastly unappreciated by much of the reading public. Jane Barnes Casey, however, is well acquainted with Mr. Taylor’s work, and this acquaintance is clearly reflected in her essay, “A View of Peter Taylor’s Stories.” A fiction writer herself, Mrs. Casey is the author of a-novel, I, Krupskaya, about the wife of Lenin. She became interested in the Soviet leader’s wife during a prolonged visit to Moscow. She is the wife of John Casey, whose novel, An American Romance, was cited by the New York Times critic, John Leonard, as one of the best works of fiction in 1977.

John Bovey made his first appearance in the pages of VQR with an article on the political appointments of ambassadors, “The Golden Sunshine,” in the Winter 1975 issue. Two years later, in the Winter 1977 issue, he took a humorous look at “Charles XI,” or, namely, Charles de Gaulle. Now the versatile Mr. Bovey has turned his typewriter to fiction with the story, “The Tigers of Wrath.” He is a retired Foreign Service officer, who now lives and writes in Paris. He is a native of Minnesota, where his short story is set.

Amy R. Sims’s article on historians under Nazism is derived from her doctoral thesis at Cornell in modern European history, entitled “Those Who Stayed Behind: German Historians and The Third Reich.” A native of New York City, Mrs. Sims is now a teaching assistant at Harvard University and a part-time lecturer at Boston College. She received a B. A. degree magna cum laude from Queens College of the City University of New York, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

John Hammond Moore renewed his interest in German prisoners of war in this country while writing his book, Albemarle: Jefferson’s County, 1727—1976. He discovered some Germans had been interned in the county during World War II (as, indeed, had a Hessian contingent during the Revolutionary War). He had first known such POWs in his native Maine, where his father used them to dig potato fields. His VQR article on Fort Hunt grew out of his work on The Faustball Tunnel: German Prisoners of War in America and Their Great Escape, a book which Random House will publish this spring. Mr. Moore writes that he went to the National Archives “to dig into a general POW story and came up with the tunnel escape at Papago Park, Arizona on Christmas Eve, 1944” as the subject of his new book.

Mark Strand’s poems in the current issue are taken from his new book, The Late Hour, which Atheneum will publish this spring. This is Mr. Strand’s second consecutive appearance in VQR. He also has another book of poems, The Monument, scheduled for publication by Ecco Press this spring.

Charles Simic made his VQR debut in the Autumn 1977 issue. A native of Yugoslavia and recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Poetry, Mr. Simic teaches at the University of New Hampshire.

Tom Luhrmann is making his first appearance in this magazine. A New York poet, he was the recipient of a 1976—77 CAPS fellowship and has recently had poems published in the Ohio Review and Transatlantic Review.

Daniel Halpehn has a new book of poems, Life Among Others, to be published by Viking Press and Penguin Books later this year. Viking also published his most recent book of poems, Street Fire. Mr. Halpern is editor of Antaeus magazine and teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Joyce Peseroff has just published her first book of poems, The Hardness Scale,with Alice james Books. She is an editor of Green House magazine.

One of America’s more prolific authors, David Wagoner has written nine books of poetry and ten novels. His Collected Poems, published in 1976, was nominated for a National Book Award in poetry last year. Mr. Wagoner is a professor of English at the University of Washington and editor of Poetry Northwest.

Alice Adams’s third novel, Listening to Billie, was published in January by Knopf, also the publisher of her critically acclaimed book, Families and Survivors, and her forthcoming (this fall) collection of short stories, Beautiful Girl. A native of Chapel Hill, N. C., Miss Adams has long resided in San Francisco, which will be the setting for her fourth novel, upon which she is now working.

Townsend Ludington teaches English and American studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he has been a member of the faculty since receiving his Ph. D. degree from Duke in 1967. He edited The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, which was published by Gambit in 1973. He is now completing a biography of the U.S.A. author, to be published by Atheneum.

A native of Akron, Ohio, Lucinda Hardwick Mackethan says, nevertheless, that “all my family ties are bluegrass Kentucky.” Mrs. Mackethan received her B. A. degree from Hollins College, her M. A. and Ph. D. degrees from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is a member of the English faculty at North Carolina State University, She is now working on a book concerning pastoral themes in Southern literature from 1865 to the present, as well as keeping house and raising two children.

Jonathan Chaves received his Ph. D. in Chinese literature from Columbia University in 1971 and has traveled and studied in India, Japan, and Taiwan. His work with Chinese poetry includes a translation of Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow: Poems of Yang Wan-li. He currently teaches at Cornell and is completing a second book of Chinese poetry translations.

Samuel Pickering, Jr. teaches English at Dartmouth College and is the author of The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785—1850.

The Edward R. Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia, Norman A. Graebner is the author of numerous books on foreign policy, including Empire on the Pacific, The New Isolationism,and Cold War Diplomacy. He will go to Oxford University’s Queen’s College next fall as the annual recipient of the Harnsworth Professorship of American History.

John Talbott teaches modern European history at the University of California at Santa Barbara and is the author of The Politics of Educational Reform in France, 1918—1940.

A member of the English faculty at the University of Virginia, David M. Wyatt has a particular interest in modern American poets, an interest reflected in his essay on Robert Penn Warren, which appeared in VQR’s Summer 1977 issue.

Whittle Johnston is an authority on Wilsonian diplomacy and a professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia.

Karen Whitehill is a graduate of Middlebury College, who received an M. A. degree in English from the University of Virginia in 1970. Her poems have been published in Shenandoah magazine and other publications.

Viola Hopkins Winner received her Ph. D. degree in literature from New York University and has served as a member of

the English faculty at Sweet Briar College. While a specialist in American literature, she is also interested in the fineries of fashion.

An associate professor of history at Seton Hall University and recipient of a Ph. D. degree in American history from Harvard University, Edward S. Shapiho is now completing a book on decentralist and conservative intellectual responses to the Great Depression and the New Deal.

Although he is spending this academic year on leave in Paris, David Kirby is a member of the Department of English at Florida State University. He recently completed a book on Reconstruction historian and fiction writer Grace King.

THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW Staige D.BlackfordEditor GregoryOrrPoetry Consultant

Advisory Editors William S. Weedon J. C. Levenson Robert Jennings Harris W. W. Abbot Roger Shattuck Ian Stevenson J. Harvie Wilkinson, III Elisabeth R. Aaron, Business Manager

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