2702 search results for: Southern%25252525252525252525252BHeritage

“Death must be distinguished from dying, with which it is often confused. “ —Rev. Sydney Smith The rarest entity in American writing is the novelist with ideas—that is to say, one who is capable of writing the ideological novel. Of course, the term is enough to put a chill on what is in fact the...

Sometimes you wonder. Having been told by a Democrat that if we had “screwed up” at Saratoga we would today have national health insurance, I suppressed a number of reactions that came to mind by deciding to start smoking again. One was to suggest that if anyone needed health insurance, it could easily be obtained....

“A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation.” —James Freeman Clarke James Madison was not “The Father of the Constitution.” I know you were probably taught that in school. I myself am guilty of having foisted that old truism of the history classroom off on countless sullen but gullible undergraduates....

For three decades, William Jennings Bryan streaked across the sky of American politics, his brightness never fading despite countless failures.  Renowned for his zealous Christian faith, he appropriately expired immediately after his final and most glorious defeat, at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. In A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, author...

This fine first collection of poems from William Bedford Clark, the renowned Robert Penn Warren scholar who, as the back cover announces, “abandoned poetry as an undergraduate” and returned to it “in late middle age,” is a triumph of elegant formalism.  This volume—which ranges widely in form and motif, from the sacred to the profane,...

There is no other American man of letters quite like Marion Montgomery. With the addition of each new book to the canon of works published by the Sage of Crawford, his achievement becomes the more astonishing; the range and depth of his thought, its variety and scope the more impressive. For Professor Montgomery has written...

In 1944, a party of German prisoners-of-war escaped from a camp in Phoenix, armed with old maps and with the intention of stealing a boat and sailing to Mexico. When they saw the “pitiful trickle” that is the modern Gila, they began to hike downstream in despair and were soon rounded up. Their leader later...

In his book on declining social morality and the transformations of liberal ideology, Brad Stetson goes after deserving targets. He unmasks the liberalism that holds the media, universities, and the publishing industry in thrall and stresses the will to total domination that accompanies liberal concerns about racism, sexism, self-actualization, and the costs of low self-esteem....

Wendell Berry is a Democrat, pacifist, and critic of organized religion.  Add to this the fact that he is a writer whose work has proved compelling to many conservatives, and he becomes a bit mysterious.  At times Berry himself has seemed somewhat bemused by the cultural conservatives who frequently promote his work.  Once we consider...

How does he get away with it? Ever since Bonfire of the Vanities, I have wondered at Tom Wolfe’s success. The success itself is well deserved: Wolfe is a dazzling writer, without peer as an observer of contemporary American life. But can’t the brilliant social and literary critics of New York figure out what he...

“The curious have observed that the progress of humane literature (like the sun) is from the East to the West. . .” —Nathaniel Ames As both a reality and an interpretive problem, the American West has retained its long-established hold on the attention of our scholars. And the same is true of Western American literature:...

“The world has never had a good definition of liberty.” —Abraham Lincoln Food lines lengthen in Moscow; show trials continue in Beijing; bicycles replace motor vehicles in Havana. As the Warsaw Pact and Berlin Wall crumble, so does the standing of Mao and Che, even on college campuses. The closing of this millennium may not...