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biography and memoir

Book Notes

 HISTORY Born Jewish: A Childhood in Occupied Europe, by Marcel Liebman. Verso, December 2005. $25 This fascinating and scathing indictment of Belgian Jews who cooperated with Nazis during the reign of the Third Reich first appeared in French [...]

Mr. Faulkner: Writer-In-Residence

It was just as well, for Fred Gwynn and me and our hopes for the University of Virginia's Writer-in-Residence Program in 1955, that our memories of Charlottesville did not stretch back more than a few years. Others recalled a signal event in its cultural life more than two decades before. Ellen Glasgow, Virginia novelist and literary grande dame, felt that Southern writers like herself living in New York were kept from seeing each other by their isolation and the bustle of metropolitan life. She proposed to UVa. English Department head James Southall Wilson a gathering of 20 or 30 leading writers in some pleasant place where they could talk with each other. The president of the university endorsed the idea, and the resulting committee invited 34, including Thomas Wolfe, James Branch Cabell, and William Faulkner. Against his inclination and better judgment, Faulkner made one of the number on Oct. 23, 1931, eagerly awaited because of the publicity that had greeted his sensational novel Sanctuary.