That most aristocratic of literary roles, the career as man of letters, has proved especially congenial to the Southern intellectual in the 20th century. The title of one of these two volumes—A Southern Renascence Man—describes the role: the writer as a Renaissance man, a man of parts, a complete personality grounded in and developed out of the many facets of...

One week after the 1984 Presidential election, while Ronald Reagan was still basking in the afterglow of a victory he takes as evidence that “America is feeling good about itself again,” the National Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Washington finally got a look at the 136-page draft of a “Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy.”...

One morning recently, National Public Radio offered its listeners an interview with a Texas mass murderer to go with their cornflakes. This monster, who had confessed to 250 or so murders, told the reporter that some of them were “sacrifices to Satan.” Aghast, the reporter asked, “You don’t really believe in Satan, do you?” (He did.) In the world according...

I am honored by the invitation to reflect with you on the life of our friend and colleague Leopold Tyrmand. There are those here who knew Leopold longer and better than I. But in the last several years I came to know him well enough that I am not surprised by the remark of one journalist who, upon learning of...

Events in India of nearly 40 years ago are in the news all at once. The television series, The Jewel in the Crown, has touched the public’s nerve—not necessarily the raw nerve. The reaction has been so strong that the chemistry of success deserves close scrutiny. The exploitation of India’s resources is an old story. The litany of complaints about...

We take too much for granted in America. Whenever we have a problem, we assume that somebody else is paid to solve it, somebody from the government. All the ancient burdens of the human flesh—poverty and envy, greed and arrogance—have been turned over to one or another bureaucratic agency. We sleep better at night knowing that somewhere someone is busy...

The Reagan Administrationhas been widely accused of hostility to the life of the mind. Cutbacks at the National Endowments constitute, so we are told, an attack on the arts and humanities and reflect the philistine temperament of the President’s supporters, that unnatural coalition of country club Republicans and Moral Majoritarians. Maybe so. On the other hand, there is evidence that...

Jazz is biding its time. It is in a period of consolidation and reflection that began as the 1970’s wound down. 1t may be that the search for roots and basic values presaged, as movements in jazz often have, a change in the society at large.  The Reagan years were not far off. The jazz tradition is not being challenged...

Though the opponents of Darwinism technically won the famed Scopes Trial of 1925, that event is generally regarded as a decisive triumph for the theory of evolution. After Clarence Darrow had exposed the educational and philosophical deficiencies of the Tennessee anti-Darwinians to a national audience, never again would it be intellectually respectable in America to oppose evolution.  The “Scopes II”...

Mr. George Kennanonce again displays his unique brand of fausse naivete in a recollection published in The New Yorker. Here is how he registers his shock of recognition activated by a stylish and moody encounter between William C. Bullitt, the first U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., and Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, on a Polish provincial railway...

Young Americans are killing themselvesat an unprecedented rate: teenage suicide is up fivefold in the last 20 years. The national response to this calamity has been curiously muted. There is a strange reluctance to link this epidemic with the massive changes in family life of the past two decades. There is, for example, a suggestive parallel between rising numbers of...

The selection of William Bennett as the new Secretary of Education came as no surprise in Washington. During his three years as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bennett maintained a firm grasp on the fundamentals of bureaucratic life. Originally the choice of the Administration’s neoconservative supporters, he has gradually gained the grudging support of most conservatives. There...

The longer I watch it at work, the more it seems to me that feminism, as we know it, is into the business of destinies. Destiny is an awesome and enigmatic notion, open to bottomless speculations. Before the recent feminist upsurge, a woman had to fulfill her destiny as a woman, an often utterly ungrateful task. It meant a lot...

A class struggle is going on in the U.S. today, a confrontation between an intellectualized elite and what used to be called the democracy. The upper classes go to good schools—Ivy League or at least Big 10—where they pick up easy answers to the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything,” while members of the democracy work their way through...

It is hard to believe that only a few years ago, political economy was dominated by talk of zero-sum socie­ties and the limits to growth. Today, the talk is all of job-creation, reindustrialization, and high-techinvest­ment. This reversal in outlook is one of the clearest indicators of the ascen­dency of right-wing themes in American politics. The left has always been more...