On both the political and economic fronts American foreign policy has been on an uneven track of stumbles and reversals. On the political front the stumbles—Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti—have been the most visible but in many ways the most...
Near the end of her life when she was apparently thinking about doing some autobiographical writing, Lillian Smith told a friend that “to tell the truth I have so many selves that I wonder sometimes how I’d do an autobiography.”
Smiles and politeness, the mollifying oils of Asia, flow as freely in Vietnam as in China, but beneath the civilities, life in Vietnam seems comparatively violent. Instructions on the door of our fancy Saigon hotel, The Rex, after some...
Physically Robert Lowell gave an impression of force, with strong shoulders and an unusually large head—not a head that revealed the skull and hinted at the brain as with his mentor Allen Tate: one, rather, that gave a powerful but awkward...
