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The Green Room, Summer 1978


ISSUE:  Summer 1978

THE American emphasis on self-reliance necessitates the refusal to be involved in time.” So observes Quentin Anderson at the outset of his essay on four 19th-century American writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Henry James. In his discussion of property and vision in America as seen by four of its major literary figures, Mr. Anderson drew upon a lifetime of learning that began in higher education at Dartmouth College and continued at Columbia University, where he received his doctoral degree and where he has been a member of the faculty since 1939. Both a student and teacher of American literature, Mr. Anderson is the author of numerous works, including The American Henry James, The Proper Study, and The Imperial Self, which appeared in 1971. His essay, he writes, “is a first step in an attempt to explain what constrained Americans to claim so much for the self.”

“The Pedagogy of Love” by Redding S. Sugg, Jr. is adapted from a chapter of his Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education, which the University Press of Virginia will publish next fall. A freelance writer living in Memphis, he has published articles in periodicals ranging from the scholarly to the general, including American Heritage, Atlanta, Smithsonian, and the South Atlantic Quarterly. The short story writer and novelist, Ann Beattie, read Thomas W. Molyneux’s story, “Visiting the Point,” shortly after it was submitted to VQR last year and pronounced it the best story she had seen come into the magazine during her two-and-a-half year stint as a VQR fiction reader. Tragically, Ms. Beattie made her pronouncement on the very day it was learned that Mr. Molyneux had died suddenly in Delaware, where he was a young member of the English faculty of the University of Delaware. Great teachers shed a light that shines on in the minds and memories of their students long after the classroom association has ended. Two such teachers are discussed in this issue. One was the Harvard historian, Frederick Merk; the other was Stanford’s literary legend, Ivor Winters. Mr. Merk, who died last year at age 90 and whose last book will be published by Knopf this summer, is recalled by his former pupil, John Morton Blum. Mr. Winters is remembered by one of his former colleagues in the Stanford English Department, David Levin.

Mr. Blum is now the Woodward Professor of History of Yale University. He received his A. B., M. A., and Ph. D. from Harvard. In pursuit of all of those degrees, he worked closely with Fred Merk, both as an author and editor. Mr. Blum has concentrated on American political history in the 20th century. His most recent book is V Was For Victory, an account of life on the American home front during World War II.

Like Mr. Blum, David Levin also received his doctorate—in English—from Harvard University. He then went to Stanford, where he was associated with Ivor Winters from his arrival there in 1952 until Mr. Winters’s death in 1968. Three years later Mr. Levin left Stanford to join the faculty of the University of Virginia, where he is a Commonwealth Professor of English.

Ken Kuhlken is making his debut as a VQR contributor. Mr. Kuhlken, who was born in 1945, reports that he “has usually lived in the Southwest, is married, has one sweet daughter.” He has degrees in writing from San Diego State University and the University of Iowa.

John Engels teaches at the University of Vermont’s Experimental Writing Workshops and at St. Michael’s College. His most recent book of poems, Blood Mountain, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press last year.

T. Alan Broughton also teaches at the University of Vermont. He has published several books of poems and last year published his first novel, entitled A Family Gathering. The book was praised by a VQR reviewer, who found it “altogether a novel to be read and enjoyed for some time to come.”

Daniel Mark Epstein is a winner of the 1977 Prix de Rome in Literature awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His new book, The Follies, was recently published by Overlook/Viking Press.

After two years traveling in France and Italy, Alan Williamson is now in Cambridge, Mass, as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University. A former member of the faculty of the University of Virginia, he has also published poems recently in Shenandoah and Agenda magazines.

Jane Miller is the third Vermont-situated poet to appear in this issue. She lives in Plainfield, Vermont and teaches at Goddard College.

The poet-in-residence at the Richmond Humanities Center, Philip Graham is actively involved in Virginia’s Poet-In-The-Schools program. He is also the writer-in-residence this summer at Norfolk’s Center Theatre. His two prose poems in VQR will be included in his first full-length collectton, The Vanishing.

The editor of The Hudson Review, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, Frederick Morgan is a widely published poet. His books of poetry include The Book of Change and most recently The Tarot of Cornelius Agrippa.

John Untehecker teaches at the University of Hawaii, where the press there recently published his book of poetry, Stone. He is also the author of Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane.

Another Hawaiian teacher is Jim Kraus, who is a member of the faculty at Chaminade University in Honolulu. His poems have appeared in the San Marcos Review and other journals.

William Stafford’s latest book of poetry, Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems, was recently published by Harper & Row. One of the country’s most prominent poets, he is a National Book Award recipient and a former poetry consultant to the Library of Congress.

A frequent VQR contributor, Richard Jones discussed the question of Scottish and Welsh nationalism in the Winter issue of this year. Now the versatile Mr. Jones has turned his talent to a discussion of an individual who was something of an issue himself during his stormy lifetime, namely, Evelyn Waugh. As Waugh emerges from his Diaries, Mr. Jones finds him a questionable figure, one to be thought of either as a tragic case or “despite wonderful gifts, merely pathetic,”

A recipient of the 1977 Batch Prize for her short story, “The Fountain of Milk,” Margaret Edwards teaches American literature at the University of Vermont. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, she holds both M. A. and Ph. D. degrees in English from Stanford University. It is upon her experiences as a graduate student at Stanford that her latest VQR story, “Watching Marilyn,” is based.

Pat Watters, formerly a reporter on the staff of the Southern Regional Council, is the author of numerous magazine articles about the civil rights movement, and two books: Down to Now: Reflections on the Southern Civil Rights Movement and (with Reese Cleghorn) Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Arrival of Negroes in Southern Politics. Mr. Watters’s latest book, a study of the Coca-Cola Company, will be published by Doubleday this fall.

A professor of English at the University of Connecticut, J. D. O’hara has long been an admirer of Dante, as his review of the latest edition of The Divine Comedy clearly reflects. Mr. O’hara’s critical essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including The Nation and The New York Times Book Review.

The Robert K. Gooch Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, Kenneth W. Thompson holds a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago, where he was a student of Hans Morgenthau. He is a former vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation and was recently named director of Virginia’s White Burkett Miller Center of Public Affairs. His numerous books include Principles and Problems of International Politics, Foreign Policies in a World of Change, and The Moral Issue in Statecraft.

Richard O’hara is no stranger to the land of Jorge Luis Borges; he lived for three years in Argentina, where he was a reporter for the Buenos Aires Herald. He later served as the Baltimore Sun’s Latin American correspondent and is now editor of that newspaper’s Sunday “Perspective” section.”I am 41, have a wife and three children and a fondness for handball, raw

clams, and beer,” he notes.

A veteran Washington reporter, Carroll Kilpatrick had a firsthand view of the administration of President Truman. Now retired, he is a former White House correspondent for the Washington Post and continues to have an active interest in affairs along the Potomac.

A member of the English faculty at Johns Hopkins University, William E. Cain is interested in Renaissance literature and critical theory. He is currently working on a study of Ben Jonson’s poetry.

Paul John Uselding is a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he joined the faculty in 1968. He holds a doctoral degree from Northwestern University and is an expert in the technological development of the American economy.

THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW Staige D.BlackfordEditor GregoryOrrPoetry Consultant

Advisory Editors William S. Weedon J. C. Levenson Kenneth W. Thompson W. W. Abbot Ian Stevenson Roger Shattuck Elisabeth R. Aaron, Business Manager

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