Charles R. Anderson

Faulkner in the University.

In 1957 and 1958 William Faulkner was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia. During that time he held thirty-seven conferences and answered over two thousand questions on a wide range of concerns, from exegetic problems in his novels to the role of the writer in modern society. Almost every word was recorded on tape, and the result is the classic Faulkner in the University, first published in 1959 and now available in this paperback edition, enhanced by an engaging, behind-the-scenes introduction by National Book Award winner Douglas Day, who as a graduate student at the time had the opportunity to observe and record Faulkner both in and out of the classroom.

James's Portrait of the Southerner

T HE PROTAGONIST of The Bostonians is an unreconstructed rebel from Mississippi who literally steals the show from a group of New England reformers. Henry James succeeded in making Basil Ransom one of his most complex male characterizations, but in attempting to create him as the embodiment of chivalry and a traditional society he reveals a certain ambivalence that raises some interesting problems in technique. When James wrote the novel in i886 he had never visited the South, and he even feared that his long residence in Europe had thrown him out of touch with the America he had known in his youth. But during a trip to Boston and New York a few years before, he had determined to prove that he could produce an important novel about his own country. In his first exploration of the theme in his Notebooks he recorded:

From a Window in Amherst: Emily Dickinson Looks at the American Scene

CAN a recluse be a social satirist? Surprisingly enough Americas most famous shut-in, Emily Dickinson, reveals talents that could have made her into one. A wit in the full Renaissance meaning of that term, she devoted her adroit mind and verbal skill for the most part to universal themes of serious import, as did her seventeenth-century kinsmen. But, again like them, she found amusement in the passing show and recorded some of its follies and pretensions in sparkling light verse. This has been largely neglected because of a proper concern with her grander poems on love and death, and because the biographically-minded have assumed that she knew little of the life around her. Yet from her vantage point of withdrawal it was possible for her to see more sharply than those who were involved in the conventions of the day. She mastered the world by rejecting it. When her satires on contemporary America are read as a group, they offer an unexpected variety of comment on that world and form an entertaining part of her letter to posterity. The salty commentary on family and friends that seasons her letters, and the occasional sallies into current events, show a