Turn to the Edgar Lee Masters entry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (I happen to be looking at the 14th edition, published in 1968, the centennial anniversary of Masters’s birth), and you will find brief quotations from five poems that...
Although the dimensions and consequences are still in dispute, there is general agreement that the quality of American life has undergone a profound change. There are those who profess to hear in the discordant sound of the seventies the...
When the Davis Family Association has its biennial meeting, The Magnolia Inn turns out the oil riggers and makes room for the relations. In front were parked three Cadillacs, a Toyota Camry and a truck that looked as if it had run into a...
Harry S. Truman was as ill prepared to be president of the United States as any man who has occupied the White House in the last century, yet he was confronted, immediately on being catapulted into office, with a wide variety of dramatic...
Some of William Faulkner’s remarks about his work are now almost as famous as some phrases in the work itself. He quoted Sherwood Anderson’s advice to him in New Orleans that he should go home and write about what he knew, that patch of...
Not far from where I live in east central Illinois, the father of Abraham Lincoln lies buried. Though I’ve lived out here in this open land for more than two decades, I had not visited Thomas Lincoln’s grave until last year, after my father...
This penultimate volume of the Virginia edition of Matthew Arnold’s letters covers the years 1879—1884.1879 was his 57th year and the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, his debut as a poet. Since...
I celebrated Thanksgiving Day 1967 in a sandbagged underground bunker at a Marine outpost called Con Thien on the southern edge of the Vietnamese demilitarized zone. It wasn’t much of a celebration. I’m told that in Vietnamese Con Thien mea...
The publication on Independence Day 1981 of the concluding volume of Dumas Malone’s great Jefferson biography has inspired almost as much celebration of the author as reflection on the post-presidential years of his great subject. That is...
