E.B. White described Henry David Thoreau, that thorny individualist, as a regular hair shirt of a man; and no matter how much we may like the Thoreau of Walden and his other writing, few of us could bear having him as a neighbor. Such, too, is the case of Eric Blair, who would become George...
“Literature is news that stays news.” —Ezra Pound George Garrett is a man of letters—a member of a diminishing breed that may soon vanish. For well over three decades he has regularly published poetry, criticism, and fiction long and short; he has also written screenplays and memoirs, and explored still other modes. This very facility...
Nearly sixty years ago John Peale Bishop published a remarkable essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review entitled “The South and Tradition.” In it he ruminated on the Old South—its glories and failings—and said that the South had a civilization because like civilizations elsewhere (in Rome, France, England) there was “a continuous succession of manners, which...