Just hours before the tanks and armored personnel carriers clattered and blasted their way down Changan Avenue and into Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, loudspeakers in the square crackled into life, and, as in Auden’s “The Shield of...
The appearance of the non-ethnic words “males” and “heterosexual” in the last sentence is no accident. The oppressiveness of the so-called white race over all others is almost as a matter of course equated by multiculturalists with male...
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...
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 this biography, N. John Hall concentrates on the “facts” of Anthony Trollope’s career by presenting the effects of the novelist’s great creative energy and by recording the results of his multiple vocations and avocations. The Trollope...
However good, most newspaper articles are destined for the same fate as yesterday’s lead story—they wrap fish or line garbage cans. Sometimes, however, fate spares them such ignominy and places them between hard covers. This was the case...
As Stanley Crouch likes to tell the tale, he and Philip Roth were having dinner in an up-scale New York City restaurant one evening shortly before their respective novels—The Human Stain in Roth’s case, Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome in...
But while William Empson is often praised and his influence noted in many places, he remains an elusive figure, a modern marvel whose “brilliance” we admire even as we feel somewhat uneasy about it.
