Norcross, 37, is not hardhearted. It’s only that if you operate a drawbridge on a navigable waterway in the United States, the First Commandment is unambiguous: thou shalt open the bridge when the ship gets there. You don’t ask the ship to...
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...
It frequently happens that an artist who has had enormous prestige during his lifetime suffers a temporary decline in his reputation after his death. T. S. Eliot is the perfect example.
The past quarter century has witnessed a major shift in the structures of American politics, often characterized as the passing of “the New Deal order.” G. Edward White’s superb new book The Constitution and the New Deal is a monument to...
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...
The first movie I ever saw was the Walt Disney cartoon, The Three Little Pigs. My grandmother took me to it. It was back in the days when you went “downtown.” There was a second feature, with live actors, called Bring ‘Em Back Alive, a...
A few words are in order about this essay’s title. It is pilfered from that great American man of letters, Edmund Wilson, who used it for his collection of American writing, The Shock of Recognition.
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...
