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...
The Bicentennial of the American Revolution ought to be a time for restoring the dialogue between the spirit of the past and the spirit of the future in our national life. We commemorate our origins because our origins are intertwined with...
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...
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...
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.”