Of the making of books there is no end, Ecclesiastes has it. Of the making of books about the making of books there is also a perennial flow. The shelves of a well-stocked bookstore are sure to include dozens of titles on freeing the trapped writer within, on finding one’s voice, on creating that winning...
The “free and open exchange of ideas” lies at the very heart of what was once called, in more innocent times, liberal education. These days, the American university is the last place to look for that unhindered flow of thought. Instead, as books like John Ellis’s Against Deconstruction, Dinesh D’Souza’s overstated Illiberal Education, Roger Kimball’s...
Over the last three decades Fred Chappell has been steadily accumulating both an enviable publishing record—he has some twenty novels and collections of poems and stories to his credit—and a well-deserved reputation as one of the South’s foremost men of letters. His latest book of short fictions, the aptly tided More Shapes Than One, may...
Throughout his long life, Henry Miller (1891-1980) wrote a handful of good books, among them The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), in which the prodigal son and narrator returns from self-imposed exile in France to tour his native United States by automobile, and Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1956), a back-to-the-land meditation that prefigured...
On the fringes of most American towns of more than fifty thousand inhabitants lies an odd no-man’s-land. Rarely more than a few blocks long, this zone—identical in every region of the country—sports a complement of gogo bars, topless clubs, pawn shops, liquor stores, a video arcade or two, check-cashing joints, and barely disguised houses of...
The landscape of American fiction is a bleak and dreary place these days. It wends through the somber back lots and blue highways of rural America, tends toward the grimy streets of crumbling cities, populated by somewhat dim and desperate characters whose main goal seems to be making it to another day. Call it realism,...
“Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains eastwardly towards our seacoast,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1808, after he had learned of such matters from the reports of Lewis and Clark. “These he would observe in the earliest stage of association, living under no law but that of nature,...
Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) may well be the greatest unread writer America has ever produced, and certainly among the most influential. Much postwar nonacademic poetry owes its origins, its way of perceiving the world as an object of lyrical meditation, and its fluid idiom to standards Rexroth set in such major works as “The Homestead Called...
“Of making many books there is no end,” Ecclesiastes has it. Like the endless streams of cat-cartoon and celebrity workout books, the flow of books factual or fictional about the American West seems not only interminable but ever-increasing: The region has long been a popular setting for a great mass of pulp fiction, to which...
Dave Foreman grew up on a ranch in the mountains of New Mexico, where he came of age in the early 1960’s. Like many others of his generation, he joined the Young Republicans and campaigned for Barry Goldwater, witnessed the near-collapse of American society in the late 1960’s, and began to realize that the system...
The Hopi Indian Reservation of northeastern Arizona is no place for strict adherents to the doctrine of the separation of church and state. The 8,000 or so present-day Hopi, unlike members of many Native American societies, have cautiously preserved much of their traditional culture and belief; most Hopis are inducted into secret religious societies by...
The literary map of New Mexico includes the names of many wellknown writers. To the north, in the heavily publicized vicinity of Santa Fe and Taos, are Rudolfo Anaya, John Nichols, Haniel Long, Erna Fergusson, Mary Austin, Paul Horgan. Dotting the redrock canyons and high mesas of the west are a roster of Native Americans:...
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was, in the old expression, a man of parts, a complex intellectual who spent much of his adult life in northern universities, a Kentucky farm boy with the heart and soul of a Confederate gentleman. A founding member of the Agrarian movement of the 1930’s, leader of the so-called Fugitive circle...
In the spring of 1847, Ranald McDonald, half Chinook Indian and half Scots, jumped ship from the Yankee whaler Plymouth and steered his stolen dory toward Rishiri, a small island in the Japanese archipelago. Having heard tales of Nippon for years—a land of cannibals, American sailors whispered; no place to be shipwrecked—the curious McDonald, who...
January 14, 1991. As I write, more than half a million American and Allied soldiers are massed on the northeastern frontier of Saudi Arabia, arrayed against the million soldiers of Saddam Hussein. At issue is the sovereignty of Kuwait, a feudal monarchy that happens to enjoy the highest per-capita income on the planet. But, more...
A new kind of animal stalks the land these days. If you listen closely, you can hear its strange call: chest-thumping roars alternating with keening wails and abundant sniffles. And if you look carefully, you’ll doubtless soon spot one, for they clone faster than jackrabbits. This new critter is now all around us, and the...
He called himself an “amateur barbarian,” but his comrades in arms called him “that devil Burton” or, more often, “the white nigger.” None of the epithets mattered much to their subject, for Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), junior officer in the Indian Army, had no time for petty indignations. He was too busy playing out the...
The art world, never a place for the linear-minded and logical among us, seems to be in an exceptionally strange way these days. Here a woman “performance artist” makes a career of doing vile things with yams while squeaking about phallocentrism; there a young man, presumably in the same spirit, castrates himself before a camera....
Like many of his generation, Theodore Roosevelt had a fondness for trekking into wild places and, while taking in the sights, shooting the large game he found. He was especially fond of hunting bears. Doing so, he recounted in Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, heightened his appreciation for his own mortality, and it made him...
The Outside: beyond wall and watchtower, on the far lee of the border, the place of the Other, the place of exile. Now that the walls are crumbling around the world, helped along by the crowbars of angry patriots; now that the faces of the other look pretty much like our own, the Outside seems...
Thomas Pynchon has been living out of the public eye for almost four decades now, a literary hermit who has succeeded by his very reclusiveness in attracting more attention than his less retiring colleagues. Seventeen years ago, his novel Gravity’s Rainbow elevated Pynchon to cult-hero status, and ever since his acolytes have eagerly awaited a...
“Accuse not nature, she hath done her part; Do thou but thine!” —John Milton Slow learners that we humans are, only recently have great numbers of us become aware of the tremendous, seemingly insurmountable ecological crises facing us. Some environmentalists date the earliest stirrings of this now-widespread awareness of the natural world and of our...
It’s a brave new world out there. Factory workers are made of metal and plastic; money, an increasingly abstract proposition, is made and lost not in workshops and fields but on flickering screens; databases grind through a million mainframes, assembling your biography and mine to a fantastic degree of detail; food is synthetic, and only...
“Step into the shoes of him who lures the enemy to death.” —from the Navajo Enemy Way On a windswept bluff high above the reddish-brown San Juan River, four states—Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado—converge. Visitors to the area come to play a game of twister at the Four Comers Monument, contorting themselves so that...
Hugh Kenner, by day an unassuming professor of English literature at the Johns Hopkins University, is our foremost practitioner of the ancient cult of the maze, a celebrant of this endless labyrinth in which we live. Confronted with its mysteries, Mr. Kenner, the new Theseus, confidently draws on a lively knowledge of science, technology, music,...
If Ernest Hemingway had any notion of what would happen to his first drafts, miscellanea, letters received and sent, and unfinished manuscripts after his death, it’s likely he would have set fire to his study and all its contents before priming his shotgun and blowing his brains out on the second of July, 1961. For...