Years and years ago—it would have to have been in 1958-59, a year that my wife and I and our two young children were living in Rome—I wrote a little satirical poem about famous old poets and what’s to become of them. It was occasioned by a couple of things. First, there was the arrival...
Several things have worked against the development of serious Christian films in the United States. From its beginnings, the American film industry has included some, but very few, Christian filmmakers. By and large, it has been determinedly secular; and, because of the nature of the business, the need for a truly enormous worldwide audience to...
“A fact is not a truth until you love it.” —Shelby Foote A while back, I wrote a piece for a Festschrift in honor of Walter Sullivan—Place in American Fiction: Excursions and Explorations. My piece, “Places We Have Come From, Places We Have Been,” argued that my own fiction and poetry, like that of so many...
This little piece requires a head note. Oddly, it is the only thing I have ever written that was honest-to-God censored. I was asked by the Chronicle of Higher Education to write a short opinion piece on the subject of contemporary creative writing courses, etc.—the scene. I wrote this piece, following their guidelines exactly for...
What we have here are two good books published by the increasingly adventurous University of South Carolina Press in celebration of the centenary of Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938). O Lost is the original version of what became Look Homeward, Angel (1929), the text being carefully established and edited by Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli from a...
“As fire is kindled by fire, so is a poet’s mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.” —John Keble, Lectures on Poetry, XVI Dear Jimbo, I am sending this c/o the Dead Poets Society. I hope it reaches you all right. Sure, it’s doubtful, I know. But, then again, why not? About the afterlife...
Dear Norman, This is the second (and probably the last) time I have written to you. The first time was way back in tumultuous 1968 when, as a kind of review of your book Making It, for the Hollins Critic, I wrote you an open letter entitled “My Silk Purse and Yours; Making It, Starring...
Fred Chappell’s A Way of Happening is a gathering of some 17 critical pieces, together with an important personal essay about teaching writing (“First Night Come Round Again”) and an essay-length introduction (“Thanks But No Thanks”), published between 1985 and 1997, all but three written expressly for and published by the Georgia Review. Chappell, author...
“If Stephen King, John Grisham, and Michael Crichton got together, they’d become one of the top three publishers overnight” —Morgan Entrekin, quoted in The New Yorker Tony Outhwaite’s article pretty much says it all, a whole lot of it anyway, about the present state of American publishing. And he’s not only right...
Nothing new here, really. Nothing that hasn’t been hashed and rehashed by my betters, the true scholars and critics whose faithful quest for knowledge has sometimes ended in earned wisdom for all of us. Sometimes not. . . . Anyway, some things, old and new, are worth saying again (and again), indeed must be said...
Despite the relentless efforts of diehard revisionists, those intellectual terrorists who seem to be bound and determined to explode and reduce to rubble the best of our Western heritage, the ancient and honorable vocation of scholarship continues, patiently adding to our sum of knowledge and appreciation and perhaps even understanding of the living past, undeterred...
Dear Howard Stern, I don’t care if your New Year’s Eve program did set the all-time world record for a pay-for-view TV event. And I don’t care, either, if your book is a best-seller and people are lining up around the block to get a signed copy of it. I just want to tell you,...
The Critics Bear It Away is a collection of eight essays by Frederick Crews, dating “from the later 1980’s and early 1990’s,” starting off, after the accurate road map of the “Introduction,” with “The Sins of the Fathers Revisited,” an afterword written to accompany the 1989 reprinting of The Sins of the Fathers (1966), which...
For this issue of Chronicles we have assembled the thing in and of itself, examples of Southern literature as it is here and now, a couple of appropriate poems and a work of fiction by one of the South’s finest writers, together with some good talk about contemporary letters in the South. I would rather...
George Core (Editor of the Sewanee Review) Talks With George Garrett About the Quarterlies Shortly following his appearance on a panel about book reviewing at the annual Miami Book Fair, this interview with George Core took place in a 15th-story hotel room high above downtown Miami, its boarded-up storefronts and decay, its winos and druggies...
When a writer lives with and writes about a character in four books and for more than thirty years, as John Updike has done with Harry (“Rabbit”) Angstrom—central character of Rabbit at Rest and of the quartet that began with Rabbit, Run in 1960—author and character get to know each other, strengths and weaknesses, good...
“In the background of the entire tedious debate over the NEA, the First Amendment has loomed, misunderstood and abused as usual, claimed by some as justification for their right to express a preference for causing pain to others during the sex act and asserted by others as the basis for a constitutional right to receive...
A text, or an epigraph, for what I am going to say: some lines from John Ciardi’s poem about the Birdman of Alcatraz who was, among other things, a trickster of sorts. These words are from Ciardi’s poem “Snickering in Solitary”: In every life sentence some days are better than others; even, sometimes, better than...
“They designed an entire solar system in just six seconds. It took God six days, if you believe the Old Testament.” —Gene Roddenberry in an interview “It’s not his life, it’s a fairy story,” wrote John Dos Passos of the life of Sam Goldwyn in a documentary section of Mid-Century (1961). Even though Dos Passos...
“Are you acquainted with Christopher Marlowe?” “The poet?” “The same.” “I am surprised you do not speak of him in the past tense. He has been dead for some while.” “Since May of ’93, as it happens.” “Well, then,” Hunnyman tells the young man. “At that same time our company was performing in the North.”...
“Publishing is something I sort of drifted into.” —Gary Fisketjon In a world, ours, in which large and small atrocities are our daily fare and to which atrocities we often seem to have become so ruthlessly accustomed as to have surrendered our ability to raise our eyebrows or to perform any moral gesture whatsoever above...
When I say that I thank you for asking me here to speak to you, that I thank you I am here, I have to confess that I am flying in the face of the latest status ritual practiced by many of my colleagues in the scribbling professions. The latest thing, as you may already...
The irrepressible John Towne tells us what he really thinks of higher education. Something to offend nearly everyone. I want you to know I share your disappointment that nobody you really care about and wanted could be here to make this speech. Sorry that Gary Hart is indisposed. Alan Alda was too busy and so...