biography

Turn to the Edgar Lee Masters entry in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (I happen to be looking at the 14th edition, published in 1968, the centennial anniversary of Masters's birth), and you will find brief quotations from five poems that originally appeared in the poet's most famous work, Spoon River Anthology (1915). Only one poem, "Anne Rutledge," contributes two different quotations, the first consisting of two lines that open this famous twelve-line epitaph ("Out of me unworthy and unknown / The vibrations of deathless music") and the second bearing the annunciation at the core of Rutledge's posthumous monologue: "I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, / Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln." If I were editing the next edition of Bartlett's and did not have to worry about space, I would include the following two lines as well: "Wedded to him, not through union, / But through separation."

Joan Givner's biography of Katherine Anne Porter possesses this "passion for life"; it is a full and moving dramatization of an inner portrait of Porter as she fought to establish an artistic integrity for herself against the most unlikely odds. With a keen admiration for her subject, Givner never collapses into adulation, nor does she become crushed by the incredible flow of facts and documentation surrounding the nine decades of Porter's life.

Do read it. It's fun, oftentimes enlightening, once in a while quite irritating, highly readable. After all, Dwight, in single combat, grappled with most issues of the last century, from the Depression to the nuclear arms race, socialism to kitsch. He was the quirky observer, the cranky polemicist, endlessly, shamelessly inquisitive. He was ever the knightly freelance. It was important, too, that he had the capacity to create friendships and feel love, as well as be a witty, brisk, verbal foe.

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 north Mississippi where he grew up. As he meditated on it he discovered that "my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top, so I created a cosmos of my own." It took many readers years to realize that his apocryphal Yoknapatawpha was basic to most of his best work. One of the earliest studies was Ward L. Miner's The World of William Faulkner (1952). Forty years later came Joel Williamson's William Faulkner and Southern History. Others have continued to explore various aspects of Faulkner's art both narrowly and broadly. Now comes Don H. Doyle with a compendious study of the sources from which this artistic vision sprang, presenting Faulkner's county in root and branch from the seeds in early stories to the final flowering in the last novels.