ISSUE: Summer 1999
If not the greatest, William Faulkner ranks among the foremost American authors of the 20th century, as attested by the Nobel Prize for Literature he received in December 1950. Faulkner created many notable literary characters, one of them being Lucas Beauchamp, the proud black American in his 1948 “mystery-murder” novel. Intruder in the Dust. Unpublished, however, was a short story entitled “Lucas Beauchamp.” How it came to light is described in the introduction to the story by Patrick Samway, S. J. Father Samway and the VQR are grateful to William Faulkner’s daughter, Mrs. Jill Faulkner Summers, for her kindness and thoughtfulness in granting permission to publish this story whose copyright is held by the Faulkner estate.
Patrick Samway, S. J., is the author of Walker Percy: A Life, editor of a volume of Percy’s essays entitled Signposts in a Strange Land and a volume of letters entitled A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy, which focuses on the American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce. Father Samway is the Will and Ariel Durant Professor of Humanities at Saint Peter’s College. Jersey City, New Jersey.
Charles Maechling Jr.’s memoir of his experiences as a politico-military adviser in the State Department during the New Frontier era of John F. Kennedy recounts his four years as staff director of the cabinet-level. Special Group (Counter-Insurgency). Set up by President Kennedy, its job was to coordinate military and economic aid to less developed countries threatened with subversion and violence. Before joining the State Department. Mr. Maechling practiced law on Wall Street and in Washington. He is a graduate of Yale University and holds a law degree from the University of Virginia Law School where he was editor-in-chief of The Law Review and later returned as visiting professor. During World War II, Mr. Maechling served in the Navy, both at sea and on the Joint Chiefs of Staff secretariat. After the War, he was an assistant naval attaché in South America. He resides in Washington where he writes for national newspapers. This is his 7th article for VQR over a 30 year period.
A protege and close friend of George Garrett. R.H.W. Dillard is Professor of English and longtime Chair of the Creative Writing Program at Hollins University. He is the author of five books of poems, three books of fiction, and two critical monographs. His most recent publication is a verse translation of Aristophanes: Ecclesiazusae for the Penn Drama Series.
Michael Rosovsky received an M. F. A. degree in fiction from the Bennington Graduate Writing Seminars in 1998. He taught creative writing at Emerson College, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Mississippi Review and The Agni Review.
Philip D. Beidler is Professor of English at the University of Alabama where he has taught American literature since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1974. His most recent book is The Good War’s Greatest Hits: World War II and American Remembering Mr. Bedler as he notes, is a Vietnam veteran, he is also a native of Gettysburg. Pennsylvania anta which may explain his distaste for Civil War reenactments.
Jane Demouy is the author of Katherine Anne Porters Women: The Eye of her Fiction (Univ. of Texas, 1983) and various essays. She taught writing. English, and American literature at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland and at the University of Maryland from which she received a Ph.D. degree in 1978 She is currently a deputy information officer at the National Institutes of I Health: she resides in Chery Chase. Maryland.
Saigyo (1118—1190) was born to a minor branch of the Fujiwara clan, a family famous for producing soldiers. At the age of 23, however, he took Buddhist vows becoming one of Japan’s most renowned mountain hermits and possibly the first major figure in establishing Japan’s long tradition of Buddhist nature poetry.
Saigyo’s translator. Sam Hamill is the author of The Essential Bashō and Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese which will be published next year by BOA Editions. He is editor at Copper Canyon Press.
A member of the faculty at California State University, Long Beach, Charles H. Webb is the author of Reading the Water, a work which won the 1997 S.F. Morse Poetry Prize and the 1998 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He is also the recent recipient of a prestigious Whiting Award for emerging writers.
R. D. Skillings’ fourth collection of stories. Where the Time Goes, was recently published by the University Press of New England. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and serves as chairman of the Writing Committee of the renowned Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Peter Henry is a young poet who teaches at several community colleges around Portland, Oregon, and has had recent poems in Open City and The Iowa Review.
Shara McCallum’s poems in this issue are from her book, The Water Between Us. which was recently awarded the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and will be published by Pittsburgh this fall. Originally from Jamaica, Ms. McCallum migrated to the U.S. at the age of nine and recently completed a Ph.D. in poetry and African-American and Caribbean literature. She is on the faculty of the M.F.A. program at the University of Memphis.
The Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College this past academic year. Reetika Vazirani is the author of White Elephants, a poetry collection published by Beacon in 1996. She was educated at Wellesley College and the University of Virginia. Her VQR poems are taken from her new manuscript, Maya Biswas: A Life.
Jenny Oakes has poems in The Paris Review, Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, and Mid-American. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she teaches poetry courses. She is spending this summer in Oregon with the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency.
Lawrence Raab is Professor of English at Williams College. His poems in this issue are from his newest collection, The Probable World, to be published next year by Penguin.
Raymond Nelson has published books about the American writers Van Wyek Brooks and Kenneth Patchen. His edition of the poetry of Melvin Tolson will be published next month by the University Press of Virginia. He has been a member of the English faculty at that university for 30 years, and is the dean emeritus of the College of Arts and Sciences at UVA.
Adam Johnson received a Ph.D. degree in creative writing at Florida State University. He now resides in Hollywood. California, and in other of his stories appeared in the April 1999) of Esquire magazine.
A native of Chicago. Philip Gould was a career officer with the U.S. Information Agency and served overseas at Posts in Calcutta. Tel Aviv, Moscow, Amsterdam, and Morocco Alter retiring from USIA, he published two novels. Kitty Collins, a singer, and The Eighth Continent: Tales of the Foreign Service He now resides in Charlottesville. Virginia.
The mother of three teenage boys Caroi. C. McIntosh seems to spend as much time cheering her sons on in their various endeavors as she does at her desk writing short stories. The key word here is seems. Her work has appealed in and/or is forthcoming in The Balloting Ark. Descant. Fish Stories, and RE:AL.
Panthea Reid is a professor of English at Louisiana State University and author of Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf Oxford which won the annual South Atlantic Modern language Association Rest Book Award and was named among the best academic books of 1997 by Choice magazine. She is also an authority on Southern authors, one of them being Ellen Douglas.
A veteran of World War II and postwar graduate of Princeton University, Martin Ochs served as a correspondent for The New York Times in London. Paris, and Berlin, before becoming editor of The Chattanooga Times in 1958, a post he held until 1971. In 1979 he joined the faculty of the American University of Cairo as a journalism professor, received his Ph.D. degree there, and wrote a book about the Third World press.
A native of Germany. Hans A. Schmitt emigrated to this country before World War II and served as an officer of the U.S. Army. He later became an historian, teaching at the University of Oklahoma, Tulane, and the University of Virginia where he is a professor of history emeritus. His publications extend from The Path to European Union in 1962 to Quakers and Nazis in 1997. He is currently completing a study of national consciousness in various European borderlands.
A former Democratic representative in Congress, 1959—63, and 49 years a lawyer in louisiana, Harold McSween has held an interest in the problem of violent crime ever since as a young lawyer he was appointed by the local state court in Alexandria. Louisiana, to assist with a capital ease in the defense of a young African American male. McSween has long been concerned that violent crime remains unabated and how “the root problem is not being addressed in exceptionalist America.”
Picture credits:
Cover and Page 420—Special Collections
UVA Library. Photos by Ralph Thompson
William Faulkner at UVA
Research: Heather Burns
THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW
Staige D. Blackford, Editor
Gregory Orr, Poetry Consultant
Advisory Editors
Edward L. Ayers
G. Edwrad White
Lorna Martens
Stephen B. Cushman
Kenneth W. Thompson
Patricia Meyer Spacks
Paul Barolsky
Robert H. Kretsinger
Janna Olson Gies, Managing Editor
Candacie Pugh, Circulation Director
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