Some of William Faulkner’s remarks about his work are now almost as famous as some phrases in the work itself. He quoted Sherwood Anderson’s advice to him in New Orleans that he should go home and write about what he knew, that patch of...
This penultimate volume of the Virginia edition of Matthew Arnold’s letters covers the years 1879—1884.1879 was his 57th year and the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, his debut as a poet. Since...
Although the dimensions and consequences are still in dispute, there is general agreement that the quality of American life has undergone a profound change. There are those who profess to hear in the discordant sound of the seventies the...
When the Davis Family Association has its biennial meeting, The Magnolia Inn turns out the oil riggers and makes room for the relations. In front were parked three Cadillacs, a Toyota Camry and a truck that looked as if it had run into a...
But disorderliness does not mean that the essays and the volume as a whole have no continuity or coherence. As an index would have shown (alas, there is none, but more on this absence later), names and topics recur throughout Melodies...
“I won a ticket for a dream house,” my mother tells me on the phone. “It cost a hundred dollars to buy. It’s a gorgeous house. Brand new and big big. If I win, I’ll give it to you. Then you and Allen can move here and live in it.”
Not far from where I live in east central Illinois, the father of Abraham Lincoln lies buried. Though I’ve lived out here in this open land for more than two decades, I had not visited Thomas Lincoln’s grave until last year, after my father...
Lillian Faderman’s scrupulous mining of the original documents and court transcripts of a scandalous 1810 Edinburgh trial in which two mistresses of a fashionable girls’ boarding school sued a wealthy matron for besmirching their names and...
