American Writers Classics, Volume 2

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AMERICAN WRITERS Classics VOLUME II

THOIVISON GALE

American Writers Classics, Volume II Jay Parini, Editor in Chief

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Acknowledgments reserved. Reprinted with the kind permission of the Estate of Raymond Chandler. Excerpts from Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler. Edited by Frank MacShane. Columbia University Press, 1981. Letters of Raymond Chandler copyright © 1981 by College Trustees Ltd.; introduction, editorial matter, and selection copyright © 1981 by Frank MacShane. All right reserved. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Raymond Chandler. Excerpts from "The Simple Art of Murder," by Raymond Chandler. The Atlantic Monthly, December 1944. Copyright © 1944, 1972 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Raymond Chandler.

Acknowledgment is gratefully made to those publishers and individuals who have permitted the use of the following material in copyright. Every effort has been made to secure permission to reprint copyrighted material. All the King's Men Excerpts from All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946. Copyright © 1946 and renewed 1974 by Robert Penn Warren. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Harcourt, Inc. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Excerpts from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein. The Literary Guild, 1933. Copyright © 1933 by Gertrude Stein and renewed 1961 by Alice B. Toklas. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from "And Now," by Gertrude Stein. In How Writing Is Written: Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Edited by Robert Bartlett Haas. Black Sparrow Press, 1974. Copyright © 1974 by the Estate of Gertrude Stein. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein. Excerpts from "The Story of a Book" by Gertrude Stein. In How Writing Is Written: Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Edited by Robert Bartlett Haas. Black Sparrow Press, 1974. Copyright © 1974 by the Estate of Gertrude Stein. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein. Excerpts from Gertrude Stein: A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. Edited by Robert Bartlett Hass. Black Sparrow Press, 1971. Copyright © 1971 by Robert Bartlett Hass. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein. Excerpts from "Unmasking Pablo's Gertrude: Queer Desire and the Subject of Portraiture," by Robert Lubar. The Art Bulletin 79 (March 1997). Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author. Excerpts from "Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie," by Catharine R. Stimpson. In American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory. Edited by Margo Culley. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.

The Country of the Pointed Firs Excerpts from "Commentary: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Politics of Recovery," by Judith Fetterley. American Literary History 6 (1994). Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author. Excerpts from New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Reproduced by permission. Excerpts from "Robert Frost's New England," by Perry Westbrook. In Frost: Centennial Essays. Edited by Jac Tharpe. University Press of Mississippi, 1974. Copyright © 1974 by The University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. Excerpts from Sarah Orne Jewett Letters. Edited by Richard Gary. Colby College Press, 1967. Reproduced by permission. The Great Gatsby Excerpts from The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925. Copyright © 1925 by Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright © renewed 1953 by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. Herzog Excerpts from Herzog, by Saul Bellow. The Viking Press, Inc., 1964. Copyright © 1961, 1963, 1964 by Saul Bellow. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. Invisible Man Excerpts from Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. Random House, 1952. Copyright © 1947, 1948, 1952, 1980 by Ralph Ellison. Copyright renewed 1975, 1976, 1980 by Ralph Ellison. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Random House, Inc.

The Big Sleep Excerpts from The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. Alfred A. Knopf, 1939. Copyright © 1939 by Raymond Chandler, copyright renewed © 1966 by Miss Helga Greene. All rights reserved. Reproduced in the U.K. by permission of Penguin Books Ltd., in the rest of the world by permission of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from Raymond Chandler: Later Novels and Other Writings. The Library of America, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by Phillip Marlowe B. V. All rights

Life Studies Excerpts from Day By Day, by Robert Lowell. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977. Copyright © 1977 by Robert Lowell. All rights reserved. Reproduced in the U.K./British

VU

AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS • VOLUME II Commonwealth by permission of Faber & Faber Limited, in the rest of the world by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Excerpts from The Dolphin, by Robert Lowell. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. Copyright © 1973 by Robert Lowell. All rights reserved. Reproduced in the U.K./British Commonwealth by permission of Faber & Faber Limited, in the rest of the world by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Excerpts from "Robert Lowell: The Poetry of Cancellation," by John Bay ley. London Magazine, Vol. 6, June 1966. Reproduced by permission.

Copyright © 1948, 1975 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the author. Excerpts from "Norman Mailer: An Interview,*' by Steven Marcus. The Paris Review 8 (winter-spring 1964). Copyright © 1964 by The Paris Review. Reproduced by permission of Regal Literary as agent for The Paris Review. Sophie's Choice Excerpts from "Auschwitz's Message," by William Styron. New York Times, June 25, 1974. Reproduced by permission. Excerpts from "Creators on Creating: William Styron,'* by Hilary Mills. Saturday Review 7 (September 1980). Copyright © 1938, 1980 by General Media International, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.

McTeague Excerpts from "Fetishism" by Sigmund Freud. International Journal of Psycho-analysis 9. Copyright © Institute of Psychoanalysis. Reproduced by permission. Excerpts from introduction to The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, by Donald Pizer. Edited by Donald Pizer. University of Texas Press, 1964. Copyright © 1964 by Donald Pizer. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.

Tender Is the Night Excerpts from Tender Is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934. Copyright © 1933 by Charles Scribner's Sons; renewal copyright © 1961. Copyright © 1934 by Charles Scribner's Sons; renewal copyright © 1962 by Frances S. F. Lanahan. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. Excerpts from The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot. Boni & Liveright, 1922. Reproduced by permission.

The Member of the Wedding Excerpts from The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers. Houghton Mifflin, 1946. Copyright © 1946 by Carson McCullers, copyright renewed © 1974 by Floria V. Lasky. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Winesburg, Ohio Excerpts from "Sherwood Anderson's Moments of Insight," by David D. Anderson. In Critical Studies in American Literature, by David D. Anderson. University of Karachi, 1964. Reproduced by permission of the author. Excerpts from Sherwood Anderson, by Irving Howe. William Sloane Associates, 1951. Copyright © 1951 by William Sloane Associates, Inc., copyright renewed © 1979 by Irving Howe. Reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Excerpts from "No God in the Sky and No God in My Self: 'Godliness* and Anderson's Winesburg," by Joseph Dewey. Modern Fiction Studies 35 (summer 1989). Reproduced by permission.

Mona in the Promised Land Excerpts from Mona in the Promised Land, by Gish Jen. Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Gish Jen. All rights reserved. Reproduced in the U.K. by permission of the author, in the rest of the world by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from an interview with Gish Jen in 1999. http://www.mcdougallittell. com/lit/guest/garchive/jen.html. Published by McDougal Little, Inc., 1999. Reproduced by permission. The Naked and the Dead Excerpts from The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer. Rinehart and Company, Inc., 1948. Copyright 1948, 1975 by Norman Mailer. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the Wylie Agency, Inc. Excerpts from "Rugged Times,** by Lillian Ross. The New Yorker, October 23, 1948.

White Noise Excerpts from White Noise, by Don DeLillo. Viking, 1985. Copyright © 1984, 1985 by Don DeLillo. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Vlll

List of Subjects Introduction List of Contributors ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren Mark Winchell AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser

LIFE STUDIES

xi

by Robert Lowell Peter Filkins

xiii 1

McTEAGUE by Frank Norris

19

THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING by Carson McCullers

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF 37

THE BIG SLEEP , ., . -. ji by Raymond Chandler ,, TJ ,, Mary Hartley

cc 55

THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS by Sarah Orne Jewett 69 Karen L. Kilcup 89

INVISIBLE MAN Lby Ralph n i i Ellison T-ir D. Quentin Miller

MONA IN THE PROMISED LAND , „. , T by Gish Jen ... ., Jeffrey F. L, Partridge

... 215

THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer ' /. Michael Lennon

233

SOPHIE'S CHOICE by William Styron

251

James L W West HI TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald

267

Paul Sullivan 109

WfflTE NQISE

by Don DeLillo

Charles R. Baker HERZOG by Saul Bellow Sanford Pinsker

199

Louis H. Palmer III

ALICE B. TOKLAS by1 Gertrude Stein Dina Ripsman Eylon

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

181

Deanna K Kreisel

Robert Niemi

ETHAN FROME by Edith Wharton Angela Garcia

163

285

Stephen Amidon 125 WINESBURG, OHIO by SherW

°°d AnderS°n J Jason Gray J

\ Ai145

Index ix

3 3

°

319

Introduction

I

t was Ralph Waldo Emerson who warned that "The path you must take, none but you must know. The critic can never tell you." What Emerson meant, perhaps, was that critics can only suggest a direction for reading, but that the actual work of reading involves the fierce application of the reader's mind to the text at hand. That application will, in each case, be highly individual. A critic's take on a book is just that: a single take, although one backed up by careful analysis, study, and reflection. This is the second volume in a series that should prove immensely useful to students of literature who wish to benefit from the careful reflection on a single text by someone who has thought long and hard about that text. The series itself represents a further development of American Writers, which had its origin in a sequence of monographs called The Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers. These biographical and critical monographs were incisively written and informative, treating ninety-seven American writers in a format and style that attracted a devoted following. It proved invaluable to a generation of students and teachers, who could depend on the reliable and interesting critiques of major figures that were offered in those pages. The idea of reprinting the Minnesota pamphlets occurred to Charles Scribner Jr. Soon four volumes entitled American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies (1974) appeared, and it was widely acclaimed by students, teachers, and librarians. The series continues, with volumes added yearly as supplements and retrospectives. The articles in these collections all consider the whole career of an important writer, supplying biographical and cultural context as well as taking careful look at the shape of the individual achievement. This new series provides substantial articles that focus on a single masterwork of American literature, whether it be a novel, a volume of stories, a play, a long poem or sequence of poems, or a major work of autobiography or nonfiction. The idea behind the series is simple: to provide close readings of landmark works. These readings, written by well-known authors and professors of literature, in each case examine the text itself, explaining its internal dynamics, and consider the cultural, biographical, and historical dimensions of the work, thus placing it within a tradition—or several traditions. Some effort is made to place the work within the author's overall career, though the main focus in each essay will be the text at hand. In the past twenty-five years or so, since the advent of post-structuralism, the emphasis in most critical writing has been largely theoretical. What was called "close reading" during the days of the so-called New Criticism—a movement that had its origins in formalist criticism of the 1920s and 1930s, and XI

AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS * VOLUME II which reigned supreme in university English departments for several decades— was often immensely useful to students and teachers, who wanted careful and detailed analyses of individual texts. Every effort has been made in these articles to provide useful and patient readings of important works without sacrificing theoretical sophistication. This second volume of American Classics is largely concerned with novels. We take up a fair number of novels that must be considered central to the American tradition of literary fiction. The novels discussed are All the King's Men, An American Tragedy, The Big Sleep, Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, Herzog, Invisible Man, McTeague, The Member of the Wedding, Mona in the Promised Land, The Naked and the Dead, Sophie's Choice, Tender Is the Night, and White Noise. We also consider Winesburg, Ohio and The Country of the Pointed Firs, which are ingeniously integrated collections of short fiction. Each of these must be considered a touchstone of American fiction. As anyone will see, the range of works discussed is broad, though each text can lay claim to cultural significance. Each of these books has also managed to attract a wide audience—another factor in their inclusion here. Two other classic texts under discussion here are Robert Lowell's influential book of poems, Life Studies—a key text in the Confessional School of poets— and the bizarre, unlikely The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, a book that defies categorization but remains a landmark volume in American literature, and one that seems always to attract a new generation of serious readers. Our hope is that these essays will encourage readers to return to the texts, thoughtfully, better informed than they were before. As Emerson noted, only the reader can forge a path, an individual way through a text, into knowledge and experience. But these essays provide a starting point, an encouragement to further consultation and reading. That is, after all, one of the traditional functions of criticism. My own sense is that we have achieved a good deal in this volume, and that readers will go away pleased and edified, encouraged along their own distinct paths. —JAY PARINI

xn

Contributors Cultural Council, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. LIFE STUDIES

Stephen Amidon. Novelist whose books include Splitting the Atom, Thirst, The Primitive, and The New City. His criticism has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Guardian, New York Times Book Review, London Sunday Times, and Times Literary Supplement. WHITE NOISE

Angela Garcia. M.A., University of California, Davis. Her poetry has been published in Mark My Words, an anthology of five emerging poets. She is currently teaching high school English at the American School of El Salvador. ETHAN FROME

Charles R. Baker. Poet, short story writer, and essayist. He has made many contributions to the American Writers and British Writers series. This is his first piece for American Writers Classics. His latest published fiction is the Christmas story "The Harp." Mr. Baker lives in Dallas, Texas, and is curator of "Mark Twain: Father of Modern American Literature" at Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University. THE GREAT GATSBY

Jason Gray. Graduate of the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University and the author of poetry appearing in several magazines, including Poetry, Threepenny Review, Literary Imagination, and Sewanee Theological Review, and in the anthology And We the Creatures. His book reviews appear regularly online at SmartishPace.com and in Prairie Schooner. His essay on Long Day's Journey into Night was featured in the first volume of this series. He teaches English at Montgomery College in Maryland.

Dina Ripsman Eylon. Scholar, writer, poet, translator, and a former instructor of Jewish Studies at the department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto. Since 1997 she has served as the publisher and editor of Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal. Her works are published in Convergence: Poets for Peace, Kinesis, American National Biography, Reader's Guide to Judaism, and the new anthology Stress(full) Sister(hood). THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS

WlNESBURG, OHIO

Mary Hadley. Associate Professor of writing and linguistics at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia. She is the author of a nonfiction work, British Women Mystery Writers, as well as several articles on detective fiction and has recently published her first suspense novel, Casey's Revenge, which is coauthored with her husband. THE BIG SLEEP

Peter Filkins. Associate Professor of English at Simon's Rock College of Bard. He is the author of numerous reviews and essays, as well as two volumes of poetry, What She Knew and After Homer. His translation of the collected poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Songs in Flight, received an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, Massachusetts

Karen L. Kilcup. Author of Native American Women's Writing, c. 1800-1924: An Anthology, Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition, and Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition. The recipient of a national Distinguished Teacher award in 1987, she was recently the Davidson Eminent Scholar Chair at Florida International University. She is Kill

AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS * VOLUME II currently Professor of American Literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS

O'Connor. Research interests include Southern literature, Appalachian literature, ecocriticism, race, and the gothic. He serves a Gothic Area Chair for the Popular Culture Association. THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING

Deanna K. Kreisel. Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University. She specalizes in the nineteenth-century novel and has published articles in Novel: A Forum on Fiction and ELH. She is currently at work on a book project titled "Economic Woman: Political Economy, Medical Discourse, and Problems of Closure in Victorian Prose." McTEAGUE

Jeffrey F. L. Partridge. Teaches American literature at Central Connecticut State University and specializes in Asian American literature. He is the author of "'Extreme Specialization and the Broad Highway': Approaching Contemporary American Fiction" for Studies in the Novel and various articles on Asian American writers. MONA IN THE PROMISED LAND

J. Michael Lennon. Professor of English and Emeritus Vice President for Academic Affairs at Wilkes University. He is the author or editor of five books by or about Norman Mailer, including Norman Mailer: Works and Days and The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing, and is the co-producer of "From Reveille to Taps," a public television documentary on James Jones. He serves as Mailer's archivist and as one of his literary executors and is now at work on an edition of Mailer's letters. THE NAKED AND THE DEAD

Sanford Pinsker. Shadek Professor of Humanities at Franklin and Marshall College. He is the author of numerous books, articles, and reviews, including The Schlemiel as Metaphor and Bearing the Bad News. He received the Association of Jewish Libraries prize for JewishAmerican Literature and Culture, An Encyclopedia, a volume he coedited with Jack Fischel. HERZOG Paul Sullivan. Author of numerous articles on art, literature, and culture for periodicals in the United States and Britain. He is also a columnist for the Financial Times of London. He holds degrees from Trinity College and the University of Chicago. TENDER Is THE NIGHT

D. Quentin Miller. Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University. Author of ReViewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen and John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain. He has published on a wide variety of American authors and is a member of the editorial board of the Heath Anthology of American Literature. INVISIBLE MAN

James L. W. West III. Edwin Erie Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of books on F. Scott Fitzgerald and on professional authorship in America. His biography William Styron, A Life appeared in 1998. West is general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and has published widely on book history and textual studies. SOPHIE'S CHOICE

Robert Niemi. Associate Professor of English, St. Michael's College. Author of books on Russell Banks and Weldon Kees and numerous articles on literature and popular culture. AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

Mark Winchell. Author of over 120 articles and essays and 13 books, including his most recent, Too Good To Be True: The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler. He teaches English and directs the progam in Great Works of Western Civilization at Clemson University. ALL THE KING'S MEN

Louis H. Palmer III. Assistant Professor of English at Castleton State College in Vermont. He teaches courses in American literary genres, African American literature, and special topics. He has published articles on Faulkner, Harriette Arnow, Cormac McCarthy, and Flannery

xiv

Robert Penn Warren's

All the King's Men MARK WINCHELL

W

northern district of Louisiana. In that position, he began to establish a reputation as a champion of the little man and scourge of the special interests. Although he lost his first race for governor in 1924, Long was swept into office in 1928.

HEN ROBERT PENN Warren became assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University in 1934, the state was dominated by one of the most charismatic and colorful figures in the history of American politics, Huey Pierce Long. Long would become Warren's inspiration for Governor Willie Stark in All the King's Men (1946). The seventh of nine children, Long was born in 1893 and was a restless and ambitious youth, eager to see the world beyond the family farm. After stints as a traveling salesman and student at the University of Oklahoma, Long married Rose McConnell of Shreveport in 1913. With no high school diploma and only a few months of college work, he entered Tulane University Law School in 1914. Although the law curriculum was designed for three years of study, Long passed a special bar exam in 1915, at the age of twenty-one, and began the practice of law in his hometown of Winnfield.

After surviving impeachment during his second year as governor, Long consolidated his power base by courting the poor and dispossessed of both races and ruthlessly crushing his political opponents. He instituted massive road building and public works programs and pushed through higher taxes on industry. (There was even a rumor that Standard Oil had put a price on his head.) During the Great Depression, Louisiana was one of the more prosperous states in the nation, and many people in the rest of the country began to look to Long for leadership. With a worldwide economic crisis threatening the very survival of democratic capitalism, strong (even despotic) political leaders were more popular than ever before. Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and Stalin in Russia were all consolidating power, even as Franco was a rising force in Spain. Domestically, tens of millions of Americans cheered as Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal greatly expanded the

When Warren was twelve years old in 1917, Long gained notoriety by defending State Senator S. J. Harper, who had been indicted under the Espionage Act for his opposition to World War I. The following year, Long won a run-off election for railroad commissioner for the

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AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS * VOLUME II powers of government. Although Long had supported FDR for president in 1932, he turned against the New Deal because he did not think it went far enough. Most observers agreed that Long was an extremist, but few knew where to place him on the political spectrum. Defenders of representative democracy called him a fascist. Advocates of the free market were just as likely to brand him a communist. After he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1930, Long began promoting increasingly radical methods for redistributing the nation's income. His political slogan was "Share Our Wealth," and his promise was "Every Man a King." He was known to friend and foe alike as the Kingfish, after the garrulous con man on the radio program "Amos 'n Andy." Back home in Louisiana he bestowed considerable largesse on the state university, hoping to make it a monument to himself. Professors at Louisiana State University enjoyed good salaries and a remarkable degree of academic freedom—so long as they did not cross the man who made it all possible. Robert Penn Warren had arrived in this unique environment almost by accident. Born in 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky, the precocious Red Warren graduated from high school in nearby Clarksville, Tennessee, at the age of fifteen. Although he had been unusually close to his bookish grandfather, an eccentric veteran of the Confederate Army who hated all aspects of modern life except for fly screens and painless dentistry, Warren's primary ambition in life was to become a naval officer. He had even received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy when a freak accident severely damaged his left eye and prevented his passing the physical examination. When Warren enrolled in Vanderbilt, he was initially a science major until he began taking English courses from the poets John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson and met an undergraduate prodigy named Allen Tate. Prior to World War I, Ransom and Davidson had belonged to a group of young men who met

CHRONOLOGY 1905

Robert Penn Warren bom on April 24 in Guthrie, Kentucky. 1920 Graduates from Clarksville (Tennessee) High School. 1921 Enrolls at Vanderbilt University, majoring in chemical engineering. 1923 Fellow student Allen Tate introduces Warren to the Fugitives, a discussion group consisting of local poets. The Fugitive; A Magazine of Poetry begins publication with Warren as an active participant. 1925 Earns B.A. in literature, at Vanderbilt (summa cum laude), 1927 Earns M.A. in literature, University of California at Berkeley. Enters doctoral program at Yale University* 1928 Leaves graduate program at Yale and enters Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. 1929 Publishes his first book, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr. 1930 Publishes "The Briar Patch" in /'// Take My Stand; earns B.Litt. from Oxford; marries Emma Brescia. 1934 Warren becomes assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University. Helps found the Southern Review. Publishes Thirty-Six Poems. Long organizes nationwide Share Our Wealth Society. 1938 Publishes Understanding Poetry with Cleanth Brooks* 1939 Publishes first novel, Night Rider. 1939*-1940 Travels to Italy on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Sees Mussolini in action. Writes Proud Flesh, a play that will form the basis of All the King's Men. 1942 Eleven Poems on the Same Theme. Becomes professor of English at the University of Minnesota. 1943 Publishes second novel, At Heaven's Gate. He and Cleanth Brooks publish Understanding Fiction. 1944 Selected Poems: 1923-1943. Becomes Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress.

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ALL THE KING'S MEN 1946 1948 1949 1950

1951 1952 1953

1955 1956 1957

1958 1959 1960

1961

1964 1965 1966

1968 1969 1970 1971 1973 1974 1975 1976

All the King's Men. Wins Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Stage version of All the King*s Men at President Theater in New York. Movie version of All the King's Men wins three Academy Awards. Leaves University of Minnesota to become professor of playwrighting at Yale. World Enough and Time. Divorces Emma Brescia Warren. Marries Eleanor Clark. Publishes book-length poem, Brother to Dragons. Daughter, Rosanna Phelps Warren, born. Band of Angels. Son, Gabriel Penn Warren, born. Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. Leaves Yale. Promises: Poems 1954-1956. Wins both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Selected Essays. The Cave. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. You, Emperors, and Others: Poems 1957-1960 and All the King's Men: A Play. Publishes seventh novel, Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War, and The Legacy of the Civil War. Returns to Yale as professor of English. Flood: A Romance of Our Time. Who Speaks for the Negro? Selected Poems: New and Old 19231966, which wins Bollingen Prize the following year. Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968. Publishes short book-length poem, Audnbon: A Vision. Receives National Medal in Literature. Meet Me in the Green Glen. Retires from Yale. Or Else—Poem / Poems 1968-1974. Delivers prestigious Jefferson Lecture ("Democracy and Poetry"). Selected Poems: 1923-1975.

1977 1978 1979 1980

1981

1983 1985 1986 1989

Publishes tenth and final novel, A Place to Come To. Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978. Wins third Pulitzer Prize. Brother to Dragons: A New Version. Being Here: Poetry 1977-1980. Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rumor Verified: Poems 1979-1980. Receives fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. Carlisle Floyd's opera Willie Stark premieres. Publishes book-length poem Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985. Selected America's first Poet Laureate. Dies of cancer on September 15.

informally on alternate Saturday nights to socialize and discuss philosophy. When Ransom began writing verse, he steered the bimonthly discussions to poetry. Soon members of the group started bringing their poems in progress for criticism and analysis. After a brief hiatus for the war, the meetings resumed in 1920. Older members, such as Ransom and Davidson, were joined by talented newcomers, such as Tate. Warren joined the group in 1923, the year it decided to publish The Fugitive: A Magazine of Poetry. Warren won a contest sponsored by the magazine late that year and was listed as one of the editors of the Fugitive by February 1924. Although the magazine stopped publication in 1925 (the year of his graduation), Warren maintained close contact with his fellow Fugitives, even as he pursued graduate work at the University of California. After finishing his M.A., Warren entered the Ph.D. program at Yale in the fall of 1927. The following year, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and began a two-year program of study at Oxford University, which led to a B.Litt. degree in 1930. (In 1929 he was joined by poet Cleanth Brooks, whom he had known as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt.) It was while he was at Oxford that Warren became imaginatively engaged with the culture of the

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AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS * VOLUME II American South. He published his first book, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr, in 1929, even as he and several former Fugitives were joining with other like-minded southerners in planning a symposium on the future of their home region. That symposium was published in November 1930 under the title I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.

that Long had created. Years later, he recalled that the only time Long's presence was ever felt in my classroom was when, in my Shakespeare course, I gave my little annual lecture on the political background of Julius Caesar; and then for the two weeks we spent on the play, backs grew straighter, eyes grew brighter, notes were taken, and the girls stopped knitting in class, or repairing their faces.

When Warren returned to the United States in 1930, he began living with Emma Brescia, to whom he was already secretly married. Having to decide whether to pursue a safe career as a scholar or to take his chances with fiction and poetry, Warren turned down a fellowship to resume doctoral studies at Yale and accepted a one-year position teaching English at Southwestern College in Memphis. The following year, he assumed a temporary assistant professorship at Vanderbilt. When the department's autocratic and myopic chairman, Edwin Mims, refused to renew his contract at the end of the 1933-1934 school year, Warren was rescued by Charles W. Pipkin, Dean of the Graduate School at Louisiana State University. Pipkin had already found Cleanth Brooks a position in the English department in 1932 and was more than eager to bring Warren in to join him.

Warren needed the distance of Oxford to start writing about the South, and he apparently needed to be removed in both time and place from Long's Louisiana to write All the King's Men. Although he wrote an earlier dramatic version of this story (the play Proud Flesh) in Mussolini's Italy in 1939-1940, Warren did not begin the novel itself until a year after he left Louisiana and did not finish it until 1946, nine years after Long's death. During that period, Warren published two other novels, two volumes of poetry, and two textbooks while teaching for four years at the University of Minnesota.

INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL All the King's Men begins in medias res, as Governor Willie Stark's Cadillac is speeding down the road in an unnamed southern state. Readers are introduced to the governor; his fawning bodyguard, Sugar-Boy; his loyal secretary, Sadie Burke; his feckless lieutenant governor, Tiny Duffy; his long-suffering wife, Lucy; and the narrator, Jack Burden. Jack is a kind of southern-fried Philip Marlow, a toughtalking aide to Governor Stark who specializes in digging up dirt on Stark's political adversaries. After mesmerizing a crowd of supporters in his backwoods hometown of Mason City, Stark goes to Jack's aristocratic hometown of Burden's Landing to visit Judge Irwin, Jack's childhood mentor, who has just thrown his considerable political support to Stark's enemies. After he is instructed to dig up some dirt on Irwin, Jack gives readers a flashback to Stark's beginnings in politics and Jack's own rather aimless past.

Although Huey Long probably never heard the names of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, the Kingfish created an unorthodox free-spending atmosphere on campus that made it possible for a maverick administrator such as Pipkin to hire almost at will. By the spring of 1935, Brooks, Warren, and Pipkin were launching a literary quarterly called the Southern Review. Then, on Labor Day weekend, Huey Long was shot in the Louisiana capitol and died three days later in the hospital. Witnesses at the capitol reported that Long was gunned down by a physician, Dr. Carl Weiss, who belonged to a rival political family and who was then shot numerous times by Long's bodyguards. Robert Penn Warren never knew Huey Long, but he knew what it was like to live in a world

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ALL THE KING'S MEN participation in the other's experience." What this leads to is the sort of metafiction in which "the factual or empirical aspect of the protagonist's life becomes subordinated to the narrator's understanding of it." Thus, "not what really happened but the meaning of what the narrator believes to have happened becomes the central preoccupation." By dividing the narrator from his protagonist, the author obviates the "problem of presenting a character with enough crudeness of hyhris and hamartia but enough sensitivity for ultimate discovery and selfunderstanding." If Willie Stark is Huey Long, Jack Burden is Robert Penn Warren imagining Huey Long.

Jack was raised the son of a scholarly attorney named Ellis Burden and the beautiful young wife Ellis had brought back to Burden's Landing with him from a trip to Arkansas. When Jack was a child, Ellis Burden inexplicably walked out on the family, only to end up as a kind of freelance missionary in the urban slums. Jack's best childhood friends were Adam and Anne Stanton, whose father was a former bourbon governor. Adam Stanton eventually becomes a successful physician with no personal life. After a failed romance with Jack, Anne Stanton drifts into spinsterhood devoted to good deeds. Meanwhile, Jack drops out of graduate school without ever finishing the dissertation for his Ph.D. in history and suffers through a bad marriage to a shallow hedonist. While working as a newspaper reporter, he meets Willie Stark, the idealistic young treasurer of Mason County. When he is played for a fool by a faction of professional politicians, Stark wises up and beats the old pols at their own game. After winning a landslide election for governor, he summons Jack to his staff. Having nothing better to do with his life, Jack decides to indulge his fascination with the phenomenon that is Willie Stark.

Unfortunately, the initial reviewers of All the King's Men were so mesmerized by Stark's similarity to the Kingfish that this similarity was all they wanted to talk about. They failed to realize that Warren's relationship to history, even current history, was not as a political partisan. In the foreword to his book-length poem Brother to Dragons (1953), Warren writes, "Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake." As a champion of agrarianism, Warren would have been philosophically more comfortable with the Tory benevolence of a Judge Irwin than with the acquisitive populism of a Willie Stark or Huey Long. But like Jack Burden and Anne Stanton, he is also fascinated by the myth of the strong leader. If Stark's assassin finally resembles Brutus striking down Julius Caesar, Warren's surrogate Jack Burden is more akin to Hamlet contemplating the vitality of Fortinbras. The problem is that Fortinbras is always stealing the show.

The choice of Jack Burden as narrator enables Warren to depict a politician obviously based on Huey Long without having to become the character. Although its roots go back at least to the nineteenth century, this narrative technique was used with increasing frequency after the dawn of modernism. Jack is what critics Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg call the "typical Conradian" narrator, a compromise between third-person-omniscient and first-personprotagonist narration. Such a narrator—Joseph Conrad's Marlow, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway, Herman Melville's Ishmael—is an eyewitness who tells another person's story.

A year after the publication of All the King's Men, Robert B. Heilman wrote a scathing rebuke of those readers who could not see beyond the superficial topicality of the novel. Generally speaking, reviewers for national magazines and large circulation newspapers are liberal intellectuals, people who would

Contending that "this has been a very fruitful device in modern fiction," Scholes and Kellogg note that "the story of the protagonist becomes the outward sign or symbol of the inward story of the narrator, who learns from his imaginative

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AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS * VOLUME II instinctively regard Huey Long as the incarnation of evil. Long may have seemed a plausible savior in the 1930s, but a nation that had just defeated Hitler and Mussolini and now faced a protracted conflict with Stalin could not afford to romanticize a domestic strong man. The only way that Warren could be allowed to write about a character like Huey Long was to make him the villain of a cautionary parable about the threat of demagoguery to American democratic institutions. When he failed to do so, Robert Gorham Davis wrote a breathtakingly fatuous critique in the New York Times Book Review, accusing Warren of being a flak for the Kingfish simply because he taught at Louisiana State University and edited the Southern Review.

tion on Stark's rise, corruption, and fall. But moviegoers (Warren included) finally accepted this vulgarization of All the King's Men for its sheer melodramatic power. Because of his ability to appropriate the genres of popular literature for high thematic purposes, Warren could simultaneously appeal to literary intellectuals and a mass audience. Strip away the intellectual trappings, and there remains a story capable of entertaining anyone. Such crossover appeal has become exceedingly rare since the rise of modernism. The kind of baroque excess that was Warren's stock in trade reminds one more of opera than of the well made literary artifact. It is therefore not surprising that, in 1981, one of America's foremost composers, Carlisle Floyd, turned All the King's Men into a highly successful opera. After the more commercial reviewers and the Hollywood dream merchants had their say, academic scholars and critics minimized the importance of Willie Stark in order to focus on the tortured psyche of Jack Burden. If anything, they learned their lesson too well. Almost all of Warren's novels feature a character like Jack Burden, but Willie Stark is one of a kind. Huey Long was a kind of "found metaphor" who embodied the clash between idealism and pragmatism. If the fictional Stark is less brutal and crude than the real-life Long, it is because Warren wanted to focus on that clash, not because he wanted to whitewash Long. In the opinion of Joyce Carol Gates, however, Warren's theme would actually have been enriched by greater fidelity to the historical record. "Set beside Huey Long," Gates writes, "Warren's Willie Stark, while far more than a caricature, is a generic creation manipulated by the author in the service of a plot that becomes anticlimactic after his death." The real Long was killed because of his slanders against members of his assassin's family. Stark is gunned down for an improbable romantic affair, which had no basis in Long's own life. The most significant scholarly debate in Warren studies during the early years of the new

Davis and like-minded reviewers would have been pleased with the 1949 film version of All the King's Men, which turned out to be the politically correct melodrama that Warren had refused to write. No longer a complex and ambiguous figure, Willie Stark simply becomes another idealist corrupted by power. (In this regard, it is essentially the same story that the film industry would produce two years later in Viva Zapata!) Also, by depriving the audience of Jack Burden's brooding narration, the movie limits the audience's perspective on Stark; he is seen only for what he does and what other people say about him. Unsophisticated readers who do not confuse Willie Stark with Huey Long might well mistake him for Broderick Crawford, the actor who played him in the movie. Perhaps because the film version of All the King's Men was made before negative images of the Deep South became a cliche of American popular culture, director Robert Rossen does not depict Stark as a stereotypical southern demagogue. Instead, the tale is removed from its southern setting to a small town in California. Almost all the characters speak a bland middleAmerican dialect. (The only obviously ethnic character is Stark's Irish-American secretary, Sadie Burke.) Moreover, the story is told in a strict chronological order, thus focusing atten-

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ALL THE KING'S MEN only Jack Burden survives to "get at least a sort of redemption."

century has been over the text of All the King's Men. In 2001 Noel Polk published a "restored" edition of Warren's great novel based on an examination of the author's typescript, which is preserved in the special collections of the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The novel that Warren originally wrote differs in several crucial respects from the one finally published in 1946.

Although Stanton, Stark, and Jack are fundamentally different in their attitudes toward life, each has been blindsided by unexpected encounters with evil. It is in these encounters that each man, in effect, falls from innocence and begins to determine his character and discover his fate. The destinies of Stanton and Stark are important in their own right, but their main function is to highlight the more complete spiritual evolution of Warren's protagonist. Jack Burden's story is a characteristically American parable about the dangers of innocence and the paradoxical blessedness of a fall into experience and knowledge.

While Polk has painstakingly accounted for many of the changes that transpired between typescript and published book, it is impossible to know how many of these changes Warren initiated or heartily approved. Polk seems to assume that Warren acquiesced to most of these changes either through duress or bad judgment. (The most significant of the hundreds of alterations that Polk identifies are changing the politician's name from Willie Talos to Willie Stark and dividing an inordinately long fourth chapter so that the novel became ten rather than nine chapters long.) Whether or not that was the case, Polk's alternative version of All the King's Men provides keen insight into both the creative and the editorial imagination. By revealing this classic novel in a new light, he reminds readers of its continuing power.

THE MAN OF IDEA As his name would suggest, Adam Stanton exists in a sort of psychic Eden—the moral equivalent of a germ-free environment. As an aristocrat and a gentleman, he is unable to comprehend the corruption and vulgarity of a Willie Stark. Cut off from the creative ambiguity of human experience, Dr. Stanton sees everything in scientific abstraction. At one point in the novel, Jack says to Anne Stanton:

THE TASTE OF KNOWLEDGE

When Adam the romantic makes a picture of the world in his head, it is just like the picture of the world Adam the scientist works with. All tidy. All neat. The molecule of good always behaves the same way. The molecule of bad always behaves the same way.

In his essay "Knowledge and the Image of Man" (1955), Warren comments on a theme that is central to All the King's Men and much of his other writing: Man can return to his lost unity, and if that return is fitful and precarious, if the foliage and flower of the innocent garden are now somewhat browned by a late season, all is the more precious for the fact, for what is now achieved has been achieved by the growth of moral awareness.... Man eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and falls. But if he takes another bite, he may get at least a sort of redemption.

Stanton represents a common tendency of our age, one that Nathaniel Hawthorne foresaw a century earlier—the passion to eliminate imperfection at any cost. Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" is a story about Aylmer, an idealistic physician married to a woman whose otherwise spectacular beauty is marred by a slight rose tint on one of her cheeks. So obsessed is he with removing that tint that Aylmer operates on his wife, employing all the wonders of modern sci-

If each of the principal characters in All the King's Men partake of the "tree of knowledge," 7

AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS * VOLUME II ence. Although he succeeds in ridding her of this one imperfection, he also drains the life from her now perfect body. Like Adam Stanton, Dr. Aylmer is both a scientist and a romantic. Jack refers to Stanton as "the man of idea/5 whereas Hawthorne writes that "Aylmer's slender figure and pale intellectual face, were . . . a type of the spiritual element." And just as Aylmer tries to "draw a magic circle around [his wife] within which no evil might intrude," Stanton seeks to protect his sister, Anne, from the vicissitudes of life. Aylmer even appropriates a divine prerogative when he says of the birthmark: "I... rejoice in this single imperfection since it will be such a rapture to remove it." Commenting from her own specifically Catholic perspective, Flannery O'Connor argues that scientific hubris is characteristic of a secular age. "The Aylmers whom Hawthorne saw as a menace have multiplied," O'Connor writes. "Busy cutting down human imperfection, they are making headway also on the raw material of good." Similarly, because of his manic rigidity, Adam Stanton the healer becomes Adam Stanton the destroyer. An early indication of this rigidity can be seen in his categorical refusal to deal with the Machiavellian Willie Stark. Even though he would be in a position to do considerable good as the director of Stark's hospital, Stanton is more concerned with maintaining a virginal persona. It is only after Jack (at Stark's behest) informs him that his own sainted father has been involved in a political cover-up that Stanton relents and takes the job. He sees, no doubt for the first time, that the patriarch of his family was not immaculately conceived. Even though he has consented to work for Stark, Stanton maintains his habitual sense of self-righteousness. When he discovers that the shady contractor, Gummy Larsen, is trying to swing a crooked deal to build the hospital, Stanton's immediate impulse is to resign. Jack concludes that his friend "must have been in the grip of an instinctive withdrawal, which took

the form of moral indignation and moral revulsion, but which, no doubt, was different from either . . . and finally irrational." (Whenever Stanton is confronted by bad news, he can be heard banging on his piano at all hours of the night.) Finally, upon discovering that his sister has been Stark's mistress, Stanton goes berserk and murders Stark in the capitol rotunda. In the process, Stanton is himself gunned down by Stark's bodyguard, Sugar-Boy. Stanton destroys himself through a compulsive unwillingness to accept the flawed humanity of his sister. If unfallen innocence involves an ignorance of good and evil, then it is a particularly willful form of this innocence that bedevils Adam Stanton. When he can no longer blind himself to the existential knowledge of good and evil, he falls and dies unredeemed.

THE MAN OF FACT If Adam Stanton is too much of a naif to live effectively in a fallen world, one suspects that Willie Stark is flawed with too much cynicism. When Jack suggests that it might not be possible to dig up dirt on the patrician Judge Irwin, Stark replies: "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something." Readers soon learn, however, that Stark has not always been of this opinion. At the outset of his political career, he is the naive and idealistic "Cousin Willie," a public servant who seeks to enlighten the populace and to govern honestly. It is only after he realizes that he is being played for a fool that Stark decides to operate as a ruthless pragmatist. His initial confrontations with realism, unlike Stanton's, do not put him on a slippery slope to selfdestruction. Instead of falling to pieces, Stark does what Stanton is incapable of doing—he changes the picture of the world that he carries in his head. Almost overnight, he ceases to be Cousin Willie from the country and becomes instead an opportunistic demagogue. 8

ALL THE KING'S MEN You know I love you and I'll live in a shack and eat red beans and rice if you've got to live that way because what you want to do doesn't make any money. But if you don't want to do anything— even if you do just sort of get a job and have plenty of money—oh, you know what I mean—you know the way some people are.

In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of All the King's Men, Warren argues that "the politician rises to power because of the faculty of fulfilling vicariously the secret needs of others." For his tongue-tied chauffeur and bodyguard, Sugar-Boy, the most memorable thing about Stark is that "He could t-t-talk so good. . . . Couldn't nobody t-t-talk like him. When he m-m-made a speech and ev-eveverybody y-y-yelled, it looked 1-1-like something was gonna b-b-bust inside y-y-you." Sadie Burke finds in Stark the lover she has never known, and Tiny Duffy discovers the successful politician he will never be.

Apparently, Anne finds in the rough-hewn Willie Stark a vitality lacking in Jack and the other dinosaurs who inhabit Burden's Landing. Her final loyalty to that ambiance and its "standards" is severed when she learns of her father's hidden crime. She tells Jack that she decided to become Stark's mistress only after he told her about her father. "There wasn't any reason not then. After you told me."

But it is in his relationship with Anne Stanton that Stark is most adept at filling a personal vacuum. One can easily understand why the redneck Stark would be attracted to the blueblooded daughter of one of his aristocratic predecessors. Although he probably desires her for her personal qualities, Stark must also feel a twinge of cultural triumph in his seduction of Anne Stanton. But why, the incredulous reader might ask, does she fall for a bumpkin such as Willie Stark? Is this simply a deus ex machina to move the plot along? The answer is that here, too, Stark satisfies a definite need.

In his Modern Library introduction, the author asserts that "Long was but one of the figures that stood in the shadows of imagination behind Willie Stark. Another one of that company was the scholarly and benign figure of William James." It is therefore not surprising that, on several occasions, Stark spouts a kind of cracker-barrel version of Jamesean pragmatism. One such occasion involves a philosophical debate between Stark, "the man of fact," and Stanton, "the man of idea." Pondering the nature of good and evil, Stark says: "Goodness. Yeah, just plain simple goodness. Well you can't inherit that from anybody. You got to make it, Doc. If you want it. And you got to make it out of badness. . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of."

Readers first learn of Stark's romance with Anne Stanton at the end of chapter 6. Earlier in the chapter, however, Warren has laid the groundwork for her fascination with Stark. In one of the novel's many flashbacks, he delivers an impassioned speech in which he announces his intention to build a free hospital for the poor people of the state. In the midst of a crowd of Stark supporters are Anne and Adam Stanton. Obviously impressed by what she hears, Anne asks Jack: "Does he mean that . . . ? Really?" And then a bit later, she repeats her question: "Does he mean that Jack?"

If the devil is to be given his due, one must admit that Stark does know how to make a kind of public good out of hardball politics. But Warren is finally uncomfortable with this facile pragmatism. To understand evil does not mean that one must embrace it. To seek to accomplish good through evil is to usurp the awful power of God without possessing His infinite wisdom. This final realization costs Willie Stark everything.

The following chapter consists of a retrospective account of Jack's ill-fated courtship of Anne. His relationship with her starts to fall apart when she discerns his lack of serious interests or strong commitments. Anne tells him:

When his son Tom is injured in a football game and suffers permanent paralysis, Stark tries

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AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS * VOLUME II belatedly to reform himself. He refuses to accept Gummy Larsen's bribe, and he leaves his mistresses—Anne Stanton and Sadie Burke—to return to his insufferably righteous wife. Unfortunately, Stark's final enlightenment comes too late to save either his legacy or his life. On his deathbed, a sadder but wiser Willie Stark forgives his assassin and tells Jack that "It might have been all different, Jack. . . . And it might even been different yet. . . . If it hadn't happened, it might—have been different—even yet."

lege," he says, "and I had hung on to it for grim death. . . . I was a brass-bound Idealist in those days. If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway." On several occasions Jack refers to the comfort he derives from this metaphysical dodge. During a drive from Burden's Landing to the capitol, he whimsically reflects on the notion that human beings exist only as they are perceived by others. For Jack, "that is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren't you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest."

A CLAMMY LITTLE FOETUS If the fragility of Adamic innocence and the pathos of deathbed redemption are key paradigms in the literature of tragic ambivalence, Warren is in the mainstream of that tradition by depicting both in the same novel. Of even greater significance is a third paradigm, which is found in the story of Jack Burden—that of the fully fortunate fall. Jack moves from innocence to experience, from glib cynicism to moral seriousness, from spiritual death to rebirth. At the beginning of the action (which is the low point in his own personal development), Jack performs his assigned duties with the cool detachment of a hired hand, caring little about the consequences of his actions. Retreating from a knowledge of himself (particularly of his past), Jack dismisses the moral dimensions of life with a facile Berkelyean idealism. Only later does he realize that he has tried to live like "a clammy, sad little foetus," neither possessing nor desiring knowledge. With knowledge comes the fall from innocence, and Jack has wanted to remain unf alien.

Several times during his life, Jack's desire to get such rest reaches pathological extremes. After he decides against finishing his Ph.D. dissertation and, again, after he breaks up with his first wife, he goes into what he calls the "Great Sleep." During these periods, he sleeps in excess of twelve hours a day, does nothing of consequence while he is awake, and then returns longingly to the anonymity of slumber. His moral lassitude has expanded to the point of psychological paralysis. For the "clammy, sad little foetus," the "Great Sleep" may well be an attempt to return vicariously to the womb. When one considers his attitude toward his own social origins, it is clear that a mere return to childhood would not take him nearly far enough. Jack is born into an aristocratic society, which has already started to go to seed. Not entirely comfortable there, he also fails to find a satisfactory vocation as either an historian or a journalist. He is in that all too familiar position of being caught in the transition of cultures. The seaside plutocrats of Burden's Landing patronize him by assuming that his heart remains with them even as he draws a paycheck from Stark. What they do not realize is that he has turned against their fecklessness as surely as Ann^ Stanton has. Like Anne, Jack finds the dynamism of Willie Stark to be a welcome tonic to the decadent

Jack's Idealist epistemology is symptomatic of his desire to escape from the consequences of his own free will. When he hears a gate open and close behind him as he stands on Pappy Stark's farm, he maintains that if he does not look around, no one will be there. "I had got hold of the principle out of a book when I was in col10

ALL THE KING'S MEN his booze and his methods of obfuscation wear out, he returns home with a new—and equally specious—philosophy of life.

privilege in which he was raised. Also, like Anne, he is rebelling against a shattered image of family life. The man whom he had known as his father left home when Jack was a child. In the ensuing years, none of his mother's husbands or lovers has come close to being a father to Jack. Anne can no longer believe in the bogus nobility of Burden's Landing after learning of her father's political dishonesty. Jack discovers a similar hypocrisy in his mother's promiscuity.

It is structurally significant that, between Jack's flight and his decision to return home, Warren fills in the details of his earlier relationship with Anne through a chapter of flashbacks. When the novel returns to its present time, Jack concludes that he probably delivered Anne to Stark when he destroyed her image of her father's incorruptibility. (Anne later confirms this surmise.) If Jack comes home with a fuller knowledge of the facts of experience, his understanding of their meaning is impeded by a spasm of defensive rationalization. "There is no reason why you should not go back and face the fact which you have fled from," Jack reflects, "for any place to which you may flee will now be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as well go back, after all, to the place where you belong, for nothing was your fault or anybody's fault, for things are always as they are."

His hostility toward his mother might also account for Jack's inability to forge a satisfactory relationship with another woman. He dismisses his former wife as a lamebrained nymphomaniac, and he loses Anne Stanton rather than become the sort of man she can admire as well as love. More than any other experience, his loss of Anne has profoundly altered Jack's picture of the world. His failure to consummate his adolescent seduction of her provides a key to his psychosexual malaise. In refusing to destroy his virginal image of Anne, he is really trying to hold on to his own innocence. In fact, Anne simply becomes an aging dilettante who can find no man to her liking until she—like Jack—is swept into the orbit of Stark's charisma.

It is instructive to compare Jack's behavior here with that of his first father figure many years before. When Ellis Burden learned that the woman he loved (his wife and Jack's mother) was having an affair with his best friend, Judge Irwin, he fled from the situation rather than face up to it. Confronted with a similar set of circumstances, Jack does much the same thing. Although some would contend that his subsequent decision to return makes him morally superior to Ellis Burden, that position is undercut by the fact that Jack is coming back not to face reality but to avoid doing so more ingeniously than ever before. Having discarded his previous stance of "brass-bound Idealism," he now tries to discount all moral culpability by arguing that the cosmos is simply a mechanistic twitch—as Jack calls it, the "Great Twitch." No longer able to believe in Anne's unqualified innocence, he denies that guilt and innocence have any objective meaning. For him, the Great Twitch is just another womb of not knowing.

Jack's retreat from normal life can be dated from the breakup of his engagement to Anne. Unable to hold the past in stasis, he tries to focus only on the present. (At one point, he says: "If the human race didn't remember anything it would be perfectly happy.") It is only when he learns of Anne's affair with Stark that he begins to be jarred out of his protective shell. Rightly suspecting that he has helped drive Anne into Stark's arms and disabused of his belief in her purity, Jack finds the actuality of evil impinging on his previously closed little universe. So he does what people have always done when they want to make a new start in life—he flees to the West. This particular flight takes Jack to Long Beach, California, where he goes into an abbreviated version of the Great Sleep. Then, when 11

AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS * VOLUME II Ironically, Jack's belief in the Great Twitch may actually move him closer to an affirmative, humanistic view of life. By recognizing an external reality, even a mechanistic one, and by acknowledging the interconnectedness of that reality, the clammy, sad little foetus is now on the verge of being expelled from the womb. For this reason, critic Joe Davis argues that Jack's journey to the West "functions as a point of recognition and discovery, so that it turns the plot from one direction to another." Thus, for Warren, the journey becomes "something like the Aristotelian middle of his plot structure." It takes a series of traumatic events, however, for Jack's recognition and discovery to manifest themselves in a reversal of intention and action.

has concluded that life is a meaningful unity, he symbolically sheds his burden, since Burden is no longer his real surname (he should be Jack Irwin, Judge Irwin's son)." Unfortunately, Jack's conclusion that "life is a meaningful unity" does not occur "once he has learned the truth about himself and his past"; it comes instead some time after the events of the novel have transpired. Nor does his discovery that he is Judge Irwin's son cause him to lose any burden (not even his surname, which he does not abandon). If anything, it gives him the new burden of knowing that a venal politician, who had once driven an innocent man to suicide, is actually his father. (And, to make matters even worse, Jack is now heir to the crook's ill-gotten gains.) Jack is most like Judge Irwin when he "causes" the judge's death. Like his biological father, Jack is engaged in a political maneuver that results in a man's taking his own life.

THE TRAUMAS OF REBIRTH A significant catalyst to Jack's rebirth is the death of Judge Irwin. Following instructions from Stark, Jack has tried to blackmail Judge Irwin with evidence of a long-ago scandal he thought safely buried. Instead of succumbing, Irwin kills himself. At this point, Jack is awakened by his mother's scream when she receives a phone call informing her of her former lover's death. When she tells Jack that he is actually Judge Irwin's son, he simultaneously finds and loses his real father. By learning the truth about his paternity, Jack is more firmly linked than ever before to his past. Not even the equivocation of the Great Twitch will absolve him of his feelings of guilt for having precipitated his father's death. Jack is an Adamic innocent no more.

Judge Irwin's death does help to educate Jack in the sense that it shakes him out of his complacency and makes him aware that actions have consequences. Also, Jack is now able to discover his mother's true nature. He can know her as a woman who has experienced deep passion, not as the coquette he had supposed her to be. Moreover, this discovery removes the Oedipal guilt he has borne. Ever since Ellis Burden's departure, Jack had been the main man in his mother's life. (The husbands and lovers came and went, but Jack was a constant presence.) When he learns of her love for Judge Irwin, Jack is able, for the first time since Ellis Burden left, to see his mother as his mother and not as a doting predator. In this sense, learning the circumstances of his biological birth makes possible a kind of spiritual rebirth.

Although just about everyone who has written on All the King's Men agrees that Judge Irwin's death has a profound impact upon Jack, not everyone can agree on what that impact is. Those critics who tend to lionize Judge Irwin regard him as a more satisfactory father figure than the weak-willed Ellis Burden. Typical of such critics is Jerome Meckier: "Once Jack has learned the truth about himself and his past and

Judge Irwin's death is not the only consequence of the historical research that Jack does for Stark. As already seen, it brings both Adam and Anne Stanton into Stark's world. This, in turn, enables the jealous Sadie Burke and the ambitious Tiny Duffy to get rid of Stark simply by informing Stanton of his sister's 12

ALL THE KING'S MEN of his name, he winked. He winked right at me like a brother."

romance with the governor. Believing that Anne has prostituted herself in order to secure him a job as director of Stark's hospital, Dr. Stanton willingly sacrifices his own life in his mania to see Stark dead. Having set in motion a chain of events that results in the deaths of his father and his two closest friends, Jack returns to the drawing board to formulate a more adequate philosophy of life.

A RESTORATION OF ORDER In the final chapter, Jack Burden as choric narrator reflects on what he has learned and the sort of person he has become. No longer is he a "clammy, sad little foetus," warm in his not knowing. Neither is he a "brass-bound Idealist," interpreting life solely in terms of his own perceptions. Nor is he even part of a mechanistic Great Twitch. Accepting the fact that human beings are free moral agents and the awful responsibility that freedom entails, he is able to forgive, love, and marry Anne Stanton. He can also face the lessons of history by returning to his long-abandoned doctoral dissertation, an editing of the journals of Ellis Burden's maternal uncle, Cass Mastern.

In the immediate aftermath of Stark's assassination, Jack is motivated only by the desire to get even with Tiny Duffy. However, when he confronts Tiny with evidence of his guilt, Jack realizes that that evidence would never hold up in court. More important, he is unnerved by the fact that Duffy is certain that Jack will now work for him. Burden is beginning to see himself as he is seen by others, and the picture is not very pretty. He recalls: It was as though in the midst of the scene Tiny Duffy had slowly and like a brother winked at me with his oyster eye and I had known he knew the nightmare truth, which was that we were twins bound together more intimately and disastrously than the poor freaks of the midway who are bound by the common stitch of flesh and gristle and the seepage of blood. We were bound together forever and I could never hate him without hating myself or love myself without loving him.

As long as Jack was able to see history as merely an assortment of facts and events, he could remain personally detached from it. (Jack's abstraction of facts from their human meaning is reminiscent of Adam Stanton's excessively tidy world view.) When Jack is unable any longer to detach himself from Cass Mastern's story but fears a deeper involvement with the truth it proclaims, he abandons his studies and enters a period of the Great Sleep. It is only at the end of the novel that Jack is able to understand Cass Mastern's experience. By then, he has himself experienced a process of fall, recognition, and rebirth not unlike the one Mastern describes.

Although Jack's evidence is too circumstantial to sustain a conspiracy conviction against Duffy (who has ascended to the governorship upon Stark's death), he could still get revenge simply by turning that evidence over to Sugar-Boy. If Sugar-Boy decides to kill Duffy and thereby court almost certain execution, then who could say that Jack Burden is at fault? Or so the old Jack Burden would have reasoned. However, too many things have happened to Jack for him to continue to engage in such sophistry. As he begins to tell Sugar-Boy about Duffy's complicity in Stark's death, he sees "Duffy's face, large and lunar and sebaceous, nodding at me as at the covert and brotherly appreciation of a joke, and even as I opened my lips to speak the syllables

By committing adultery with the wife of his best friend, Duncan Trice, Cass Mastern drives Duncan to suicide. In addition to experiencing a personal fall from grace, he also comes to see his sin as having cosmic ramifications. In his diary, Mastern writes: I suddenly felt that the world outside of me was shifting and the substance of things, and that the process had only begun of a general disintegration of which I was the center.... Or to figure the mat-

13

AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS • VOLUME II ter differently, it was as though the vibration set up in the whole fabric of the world by my act had spread infinitely and with ever increasing power and no man could know the end.

making such an analogy, Jack surely tells us more about himself than he does about Mastern. (Otherwise, it would be hard to justify such a lengthy historical digression from the main plot of the novel.) Jack's final perspective on Cass Mastern is developed only after he has ceased to be a solipsistic innocent, only after he has himself brushed the spiderweb of life.

In order to atone for the "vibrations" of his deed, Mastern tries to find Phebe, a slave girl whom his mistress, Annabelle Trice, has sold down the river. Annabelle Trice cannot stand to have Phebe around because the girl knows that her owner's affair with Mastern has prompted Duncan Trice's suicide. Feeling an understandable complicity in the girl's fate, Mastern nearly dies in his unsuccessful attempt to find her. He frees his own slaves and enlists as a common soldier in the Confederate Army, secretly vowing never to use the rifle that he carries. After suffering what proves to be a mortal wound, Mastern writes in his journal: "I do not question the justice of God, that others have suffered for my sin, for it may be that only by the suffering of the innocent does God affirm that men are brothers, and brothers in His Holy Name."

The similarities and differences between the story of Cass Mastern and that of the Judge Irwin (Jack's two ventures into historical research) are illuminating. As James H. Justus notes in his magisterial study The Achievement of Robert Perm Warren, "Mastern and Judge Irwin share a similar pattern of taint: both cuckold their best friends; the actions of both drive another man to suicide and bring suffering upon an innocent woman." Unfortunately, Justus goes on to argue that both men "admit and accept responsibility for their actions." That, of course, is precisely what Judge Irwin fails to do. In his efforts to conceal his crime (even to the point of killing himself rather than face exposure), the judge seems poles apart from the conscience-stricken Cass Mastern. Surely, the most profound difference between these two men is that Mastern does admit responsibility for his actions, whereas the Judge does not. In effect, Mastern and Irwin provide Jack with contrasting models of response to similar situations. What Jack does is to find a via media between Mastern's melodramatic martyrdom and the judge's hypocritical selfaggrandizement.

If this last statement is lifted out of its context, one can easily see it as self-justifying sophistry. Mastern, however, is not arguing for the efficacy of sin as a pathway to redemption. For man after the Fall, the fact of sin is inescapable. Once he has fallen, he can no longer choose between purity and taint; all he can do is acknowledge or abjure his complicity in the world of liability and error. Adam Stanton never accepts his complicity, whereas Cass Mastern and Willie Stark accept theirs only after they have destroyed themselves. (Still, the lesson of tragedy is that a late epiphany is better than none at all.)

THE AWFUL RESPONSIBILITY OF TIME

Just as Stark acknowledges that things might have been different, Mastern learns that "the world is like an enormous spider web." If one touches the web "however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more." This analogy, however, does not belong to Cass Mastern. Rather, it is Jack's way of interpreting Mastern's theodicy. And in

Although All the King's Men ends happily for Jack Burden, the book can hardly be termed naively optimistic. Of the many stories it tells, one is of the tragically vulnerable innocence of Adam Stanton; another is of the myopic cynicism of Willie Stark. It is as if Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nicolo Machiavelli had clashed in single-combat warfare and, like the gingham

14

ALL THE KING'S MEN Those readers who find Judge Irwin to be a more appealing character than Ellis Burden should remember that, by the end of the novel, Jack tries to reject the judge's patrimony (land and money) and is on the verge of accepting what Ellis Burden offers him (moral insight). Of course, in his willingness to enter the "convulsion of the world" rather than retreat from it as Ellis Burden has done, Jack proves to be his own man. (It would seem that, in acknowledging the necessity of evil as part of the pattern of salvation, Ellis Burden has moved beyond his earlier pathological refusal to "touch the world of foulness again.") Nevertheless, Jack is finally more the son of his foster father than of his real one. The fact that he can understand the story of Cass Mastern (who is Ellis Burden's ancestor) is a strong indication that Jack knows more of Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in Judge Irwin's philosophy.

dog and the calico cat, had eaten each other up. It is at this point that Jack Burden steps out of his role as peripheral narrator and takes center stage. Through his involvement in the deaths of his father and his two best friends he finally comes to know himself and to accept his complicity in a world that is all too real. Having experienced the psychological equivalent of a religious conversion, he assumes responsibility for the care of his first father figure, the saintly ascetic Warren calls the "Scholarly Attorney." The old man, who spends much of his time writing and distributing religious tracts, dictates the following to Jack: The creation of man whom God in His foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God's omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate from God Himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God's glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man's glory and power. But by God's help. By His help and in His wisdom.

James Ruoff has noted that "the conclusion to All the King's Men is reminiscent of the ending of another great tragedy as Jack Burden and Anne Stanton, like Adam and Eve departing from the Garden after the Fall, prepare to leave Burden's Landing forever." Although Jack and Anne are not fortified by the vision of the Second Coming that the Archangel Michael vouchsafed to Adam in Milton's Paradise Lost, Warren still seems to find the possibility of happiness to be grounded in eternal verities. And, if his statement of those verities is neither as specific nor as orthodox as some might like, the message is clear enough—beyond the stink of the didie and the stench of the shroud, it is possible to find a sort of redemption.

Taken as pure theology, this statement is no doubt heretical. Man's separateness from God is a function of the Fall, not of the Creation. And, Willie Stark notwithstanding, man is singularly incapable of creating good. Nevertheless, the existence of evil—precisely because it necessitates so great a redemption—may well be the index of God's glory and power.

Select Bibliography EDITIONS All the King's Men. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946. (The first edition of Warren's classic novel. All quotations taken from this text.)

15

AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS « VOLUME II All the King's Men. New York: Modern Library, 1953. (Warren's introduction discusses the influence of William James, Machiavelli, and others on All the King's Men.) All the King's Men. (Established by Noel Polk from Robert Penn Warren's typescripts at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.) New York: Harcourt, 2001. (An alternative, restored edition of All the King's Men based on an analysis of Warren's typescript.)

OTHER WORKS BY WARREN "Knowledge and the Image of Man." Sewanee Review 62 (spring 1955): 182-192. (A philosophical meditation that serves as a gloss for All the King's Men and other imaginative works by Warren.) "All the King's Men and the Matrix of Experience." Yale Review 53 (winter 1964): 161167. (Warren's account of the process of writing All the King's Men.) Foreword to Brother to Dragons: A New Version. New York: Random House, 1979. (Contains valuable insights into Warren's views regarding the historical imagination.)

SECONDARY WORKS All the King's Men: A Symposium. Carnegie Series in English, no. 3. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Press, 1957. Baumbach, Jonathan. "The Metaphysics of Demagoguery." In his The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. New York: New York University Press, 1965. Pp. 16-34. (Focuses on All the King's Men as primarily the story of Jack Burden's spiritual journey.) Beebe, Maurice, and Leslie A. Field, eds. Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: A Critical Handbook. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1966. Blotner, Joseph. Robert Penn Warren: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1997. (The definitive biography of Warren, thoroughly researched and lucidly written.) Bohner, Charles. Robert Penn Warren. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1981. (An excellent general introduction to Warren's work through 1980. Devotes fifteen pages to All the King's Men.) Carter, Everett. "The 'Little Myth' of Robert Penn Warren." Modern Fiction Studies 6 (spring 1960): 3-12. (Argues that Warren sees Americans as "neither exclusively a band of angels or brothers to dragons.") Casper, Leonard W. Robert Penn Warren: The Dark and Bloody Ground. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960. (The first book-length study of Warren. Contains only scattered references to All the King's Men.) Chambers, Robert H., ed. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of All the King's Men. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977. Clark, William Bedford. The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991. , ed. Critical Essays on Robert Penn Warren. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Davis, Joe. "Robert Penn Warren and the Journey to the West." Modern Fiction Studies 6 (spring 1960): 73-82. (Discusses the significance of the journey west in several of Warren's major narratives, both fictional and poetic.) Fiedler, Leslie A. "Robert Penn Warren: A Final Word." South Carolina Review 23 (fall 1990): 9-16. (A meditation on Warren's ability to appeal to both sophisticated and popular audiences.)

16

ALL THE KING'S MEN Guttenburg, Barnett. Web of Being: The Novels of Robert Penn Warren. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1975. (Treats Warren as a philosophical novelist. Discusses All the King's Men in light of Coleridge and Heidegger.) Justus, James H. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. (The best single book on the greater body of Warren's work.) . "Burden's Willie." South Carolina Review 23 (fall 1990): 29-35. (A consideration of the theme of fathers and sons in All the King's Men.) Light, James R, ed. The Merrill Studies in All the King's Men. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E.Merrill, 1971. Meckier, Jerome. "Burden's Complaint: The Disintegrated Personality as Theme and Style in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men." Studies in the Novel 2 (spring 1970): 7-21. (An analysis of Jack Burden as divided personality.) Oates, Joyce Carol. "'All the King's Men'—A Case of Misreading?" New York Review of Books, March 28, 2002, pp. 43-47. (A long, mostly negative, evaluation of All the King's Men occasioned by the publication of Noel Polk's "restored edition" of the novel.) O'Connor, Flannery. "Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann." In her Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962. Pp. 213-228. (This essay about a young girl who died of cancer includes a discussion of Hawthorne's Aylmer—a possible precursor to Warren's Adam Stanton.) Rubin, Louis D., Jr. "Burden's Landing: All the King's Men and the Modern South." In his The Faraway Country: Writers of the Modern South. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963. Pp. 105-130. (Considers All the King's Men in terms of the social structure of the modern South.) Runyon, Randolph Paul. The Taciturn Text: The Fiction of Robert Penn Warren. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990. (A Freudian interpretation of Warren's fiction. Discusses the importance of winks and other gestures in All the King's Men.) Ruoff, James. "Humpty Dumpty and All the King's Men: A Note on Robert Penn Warren's Teleology." Twentieth Century Literature 3 (October 1957): 128-134. (A seminal analysis of the theological implications of All the King's Men.) Scholes, Robert, and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. (A theoretical discussion of narrative techniques in fiction. Comments on the "Conradian" narrator are particularly relevant to All the King's Men.) Snipes, Katherine. Robert Penn Warren. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983. (A brief but useful introduction to Warren's work.) Walling, William. "In Which Humpty Dumpty Becomes King." In The Modern American Novel and the Movies. Edited by G. Peary and R. Shatzkin. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978. Pp. 168-177. (A consideration of the differences between the novel and movie versions of All the King's Men.) Wilcox, Earl J. "The 'Good old Boy' King: Carlisle Floyd's Willie Stark." South Carolina Review 22 (spring 1990): 106-115. (The fullest account yet of the operatic version of All the King's Men.) Williams, T. Harry. Huey Long. New York: Knopf, 1969. (Still the definitive biography of the Louisiana Kingfish, at once magisterial and engrossing.) 17

AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS • VOLUME II Wilson, Deborah. "Medusa, the Movies, and the King's Men." In The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren. Edited by David Madden. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Pp. 70-83. (An essentially feminist interpretation of the film version of All the King's Men with some passing references to film noir.) Winchell, Mark Royden. "Renaissance Men: Shakespeare's Influence on Robert Penn Warren." In Shakespeare and Southern Writers: A Study in Influence. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. Pp. 137-158. (Includes a discussion of Jack Burden as an American version of Hamlet.) Woodell, Harold. All the King's Men: The Search for a Usable Past. New York: Twayne, 1993. (The only single-author book devoted exclusively to All the King's Men. An excellent introduction for university undergraduates and general readers alike.)

18

Theodore Dreiser's

An American Tragedy ROBERT NIEMI

I

pessimistic novels attacking American capitalism. Dreiser's political sympathies were, indeed, with the radical Left and his writing was often excessively wordy and sometimes clumsy, but it is nowhere near as awful as his detractors claim. The iconic figure in the literary naturalist tradition, Dreiser remains one of the greatest of twentieth-century American writers; not for his sometimes fitful prose mastery but as his nation's most trenchant critic of the American success ethos.

N TERMS OF overall unity of effect and sociopolitical significance, An American Tragedy (1925) stands unequivocally as Theodore Dreiser's masterpiece and is widely recognized as one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. The enduring importance of An American Tragedy rests in its theme and object of critique: the American culture's exclusive worship of what William James termed "the bitch-goddess, success," which can be defined as achievement measured by money, possessions, and social status rather than wisdom, learning, moral virtue, or spiritual striving. Dreiser's An American Tragedy remains part of the literary canon because the book tells a fundamental and ugly truth about an entire civilization. It is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the root psychology of American culture and the ideology of the socalled American Dream.

Dreiser was born August 27, 1871, in Terre Haute, Indiana, the ninth of his family's ten surviving children. Unlike most writers of his time, who were of venerable Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage, Dreiser's parents were poor, devout German Catholic immigrants. His father, John Paul Dreiser Sr., had established a woolen mill in the 1860s, but the mill went out of business around 1870 due to a variety of factors, plunging the family into long-term poverty. Under the stern leadership of their somewhat demented and God-obsessed patriarch, the Dreiser family moved constantly in a ceaseless effort to avoid poverty and starvation. In 1879 John Paul Dreiser and his wife, Sarah, faced the realization that they could not provide for so

THE AUTHOR The received, smug, and somewhat misconceived "wisdom" on Theodore Dreiser is that he was an embarrassingly inept prose stylist and leftist naysayer who wrote big, ponderous, 19

AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS * VOLUME II large a family; father and mother were forced to separate, and the children were divided between them. In the years that followed, the family was repeatedly reconstituted, dissolved, and reconstituted again in a variety of midwestern cities and towns.

CHRONOLOGY 18H 1879

1889-489Q 1892-1893 ' -, ' " •" 1894 '" 1898 1900 1901-4905

Not surprisingly, Dreiser's schooling was erratic at best. In 1887, at the age of sixteen, he fled his miserable, emotionally suffocating family and struck out on his own, surviving by working a series of menial jobs. With financial help from a former high-school teacher, Dreiser entered Indiana University in 1889. Although he dropped out of college after a year, Dreiser, an instinctive autodidact and voracious reader, continued to learn and to grow intellectually. In 1892 he started working as a journalist for the Chicago Globe, soon moving on to a better position at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, but Dreiser's stint as a journalist was brief. In 1894 he moved to New York City and began a career in publishing, eventually working his way up to the presidency of Butterick Publications, a publisher of women's magazines.

1907

1910

1911 1912 ,

In 1898 Dreiser married Sara White (nicknamed "Jug"), a schoolteacher he had met on a trip to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Though his passion for Sara White had faded years before they were wed, Dreiser married her out of a sense of duty. The union proved to be a disastrous mistake. A conventional sort of woman, Sara wanted nothing more than a respectable bourgeois marriage while Dreiser— mercurial, artistically ambitious, intensely libidinous, and freedom loving—was temperamentally unsuited to the lifestyle his wife desired. They lived apart after 1909 but never divorced. (Sara Dreiser died in 1942.) An adherent of the dictum that sex is the most powerful of human drives, Dreiser indulged his erotic appetites with numerous affairs and made sexual passion a salient feature of almost all his novels.

1913 1914

1915

1916 1919

1920 1922 1923 1925

In 1900 Dreiser brought out his first novel, Sister Carrie, the story of a midwestern farm girl

20

Herman Theodore Dreiser born August;27, in Terire Haute, Indiana. Family disintegrates; Dreiser accompanies his nfcpther to Vincennes, SuB*va%an ':C' ;';:' r'"'! : 1912 rHeturm to America atod settles in lm • - ","/; V Angeles. '.- -".' •'•"/' ,} '-. 'V", .'/-> \\'. I?i7 v Enlists in thfc Catoiiaii tfmj in_. *'k^ with Billy Wllfc, adapted from James ML Gain*s now! of the same tide) m&Aftd N& , ' ' ' / ' : '.' v. - , • 1944 t^tefUnlfaene$$.

Life Studies is as much a record of the poet's journey to a new open style as it is the earliest example of it. Within the volume, a reader can follow a mini-progression from the more formal metrics of Lowell's earlier work, seen in the four poems that open the book, to the eventual free verse metrics used to explore family history and his own haunted self at the book's end. In this way the book's arrangement lays out a set of formal challenges, resolving each of them as it proceeds. The content of the poems also makes clear that Life Studies is a very great book that survived a very troubled author. The tension between Lowell's formal experimentation and his own relentless self-examination is key to the book's artistry, as well as a source of the debate long forwarded about the merits of Lowell's

1946

Publishes Lord Weary's Czstle, which wins wide critical acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize. 1947 Wins American Academy-National Institute of Arts and Letters grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 1947-1948 Serves as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. 1948 Divorces Stafford. 1949 In March, Lowell is institutionalised for a nervous breakdown. Returns to

164

LIFE STUDIES

1950 1?M

>:r::New^Xbtk'Mftfc^ Elfe*beth Hard^n^^mj^y^ Poems &3t,l9M. Hifetaife*

t9?&~f976 Reriden,0/M&til$e$$

and

- \: :", /. 'v \;'b^ara^ew-TOtd;t^i^ai|:'li[&e^eri* ' * ;'';': :-,' *'r3:Xe^:dfe Wbrf*fe$i*>

I$f3 :
which ,: is published posthumousluy in 1941 as ; ,:X-;://' > V>^W&iA^4llOve^; II: 146, 159 Jung, Carl, II: 281 Kaddish and Other Poems (Ginsberg), I: 72, 84 Kafka, Franz, I: 352, 356 Kamera Obscura. See Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov) Kaufmann, Philip, I: 195 Kearney, Patrick, II: 31 Keats, John, I: 72, 73, 350, 366 Kennedy, John R, I: 282; II: 217, 286 Kenner, Hugh, I: 372 Kerouac, Jack, I: 72-73, 75, 82, 83, 84, 183-197 Kesey, Ken, I: 84 Kierkegaard, S0ren, I: 221, 222 "Killer in the Rain" (Chandler), II: 64, 67 King, Genevra, II: 110, 112 King, Grace, II: 82 King, Martin Luther, Jr., I: 71; II: 217

King, Stephen, I: 339, 344, 356 King James Bible, I: 353 "King of the Bingo Game" (Ellison), II: 148 "King Pest" (Poe), I: 353 Kingy Queen, Knave (KoroV, dama, valet) (Nabokov), I: 90 Kingston, Maxine Hong, II: 229 Kinnell, Galway, II: 176 Kipling, Rudyard, I: 110, 136, 372 Knopf, Alfred, II: 67 "Knowledge and the Image of Man" (Warren), II: 7 Kogawa, Joy, II: 229 KoroV, dama, valet. See King, Queen, Knave (Nabokov) Kreutzer Sonata (Tolstoy), I: 146 Kropotkin, Peter, I: 110 Krutch, Joseph Wood, I: 139 Kubrick, Stanley, I: 105-106 Kupferberg, Tuli, I: 78 Lady in the Lake, The (Chandler), II: 56 Lady of the Lake, The (Scott), I: 164 Lamantia, Philip, I: 75 Lamb, Arthur A., II: 190 Lament, Rosette, II: 141 Lamplighter (Cummins), I: 258, 260 Land of Unlikeness (R. Lowell), II: 164 Lang, Fritz, I: 81 Lardner, Ring, II: 267-268 Last Tycoon, The (Fitzgerald), II: 111, 122, 269, 282 Last Yankee, The (A. Miller), I: 55 Laughter in the Dark (Kamera Obscura) (Nabokov), I: 90 Laurencin, Marie, II: 40, 48 Lawrence, D. H., I: 310 Lazare (Malraux), II: 255 LeConte, Joseph, II: 185 Lectures in America (Stein), II: 40-41 Lee, Gypsy Rose, II: 201, 203 Lee, Harper, II: 199 Legacy of the Civil War, The (Warren), 11:3 "Lena Lingard" (Jewett), I: 144 Lengyel, Olga, II: 253 Lennon, J. Michael, II: 233 Leopardi, Giacomo, I: 355 Letters to J. D. Salinger (collection), I: 51 Levertov, Denise, II: 176 Levi, Primo, II: 253 Lewis, Sinclair, I: 125-141, 329, 334; II: 21,315 Libra (DeLillo), II: 286 Lie Down in Darkness (Styron), II: 252, 259 Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, The (Sterne), I: 349

324

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, The (Douglass), I: 165, 167 Life on the Mississippi (Twain), I: 3 Life Studies (R. Lowell), II: 163-179 "Life Studies" (R. Lowell), II: 166, 167 "Ligeia" (Poe), I: 346, 347, 350 Lincoln, Abraham, I: 165, 180, 237, 238, 239, 252 Lindsay, Vachel, I: 138; II: 125 Linnell, Avis, II: 22, 23 "Lionizing" (Poe), I: 349, 355 "Literary Situation in 1895, The" (Gather), I: 147 "Little Annie's Ramble" (Hawthorne), 1:259 Little Sister, The (Chandler), II: 56 Little Women (Alcott), I: 149 Liveright, Horace, II: 31 Loeser, Charles, II: 38 Lolita (Nabokov), I: 89-108 Lolita: A Screenplay (Nabokov), I: 91, 106 Lombroso, Cesare, II: 188, 189 "London" (Blake), I: 81 London, Jack, I: 185; II: 186, 239 "Loneliness" (Anderson), II: 312 Long, Huey, II: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9 Long Day's Journey into Night (O'Neill), I: 109-124 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, I: 258, 275 "Long Gay Book, A" (Stein), II: 50 Long Goodbye, The (Chandler), II: 55, 56, 57, 59-60, 61, 66 Long March, The (Styron), II: 252 Look at the Harlequins! (Nabokov), I: 91 "Looking Back on Girlhood" (Jewett), 11:69 Lord Jim (Conrad), II: 110 Lord Weary ys Castle (R. Lowell), II: 163-164, 168, 171, 176 "Loss of Breath" (Poe), I: 340, 352 "Lost Generation, The" (Hemingway), 1:321 Lost Lady, A (Gather), I: 144, 151 Lost on the Road (Kerouac), I: 188 Lovecraft, H. P., I: 344, 356; II: 83 Love on the Road (Kerouac), I: 188 "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The" (T S. Eliot), I: 360 Lowe, Pardee, II: 229 Lowell, Amy, II: 84 Lowell, James Russell, I: 275, 339-340 Lowell, Robert, I: 85; II: 163-179 Lucian of Samosata, I: 354, 355 Ludwig, Jack, II: 141 Luke, Gospel According to, I: 174 Lyly, John, I: 366 Lyne, Adrian, I: 106

INDEX Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, I: 342, 348 Macbeth (Shakespeare), I: 298-299 McCarthy, Joseph, II: 32, 177 McClure, Michael, I: 75, 195 McClure, Samuel, II: 83 McClurg, Alexander, I: 237, 251 McCullers, Carson, II: 199-213 McEwan, Ian, I: 234 Machiavelli, Nicolo, II: 14-15 Mclnerney, Jay, I: 51 McKinley, William, 1:180 McTeague (Norris), II: 21, 181-198 "Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich, A" (R. Lowell), II: 166, 168, 172 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (S. Crane), I: 238, 240 Maggie Cassidy (Kerouac), I: 184, 185 Mailer, Norman, I: 178, 234, 335; II: 233-250, 251 Main Street (Lewis), I: 125-141; II: 315 Making of Americans, The (Stein), II: 38, 39, 43, 50 Malina, Judith, I: 195 Malraux, Andre, II: 255 Mamet, David, I: 122 "Man and Wife" (R. Lowell), II: 174 "Mandarin's Jade" (Chandler), II: 64 Man's Woman, A (Norris), II: 183, 186 Mantrap (Lewis), I: 126 Man Who Had All the Luck, The (A. Miller), I: 54 Man Who Knew Coolidge, The (Lewis), I: 126 "Man Who Was Used Up, The: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign" (Poe), I: 349-350 Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The (television series), I: 195 Many Marriages (Anderson), II: 304 Mao II (DeLillo), II: 286, 289 Marble Faun, The (Hawthorne), I: 258, 261 Marching Men (Anderson), II: 303, 304 "Marginalia" (Poe), I: 340, 341 Marilyn: A Novel Biography (Mailer), II: 234 "Marriott, the Marine" (Styron), II: 251 "Martha's Lady" (Jewett), II: 84 Marvell, Andrew, I: 367 Marx, Karl, I: 110, 288; II: 193, 194, 195, 246 Mary (Mashenyka) (Nabokov), I: 90 Mashen'ka. See Mary (Nabokov) "Masque of the Red Death, The" (Poe), I: 345, 351 Masters, Edgar Lee, II: 125, 315 Matisse, Henri, II: 38, 40, 43, 45, 48

Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein Mont Sainte-Victoire (Cezanne painting), II: 38 (Stein), II: 50 Moore, Marianne, I: 72; II: 85 Matthiessen, F. O., II: 82 Moore, Thomas, I: 346 Maupassant, Guy de, II: 185, 186 Moran, Lois, II: 268, 273 Maw, Nicholas, II: 263 Moran of the Lady Letty (Norris), II: Maynard, Joyce, I: 35 183, 185 Maysles, Albert, I: 195 Meet Me in the Green Glen (Warren), Morath, Ingeborg, I: 54, 55 More, Thomas, I: 354 11:3 Melville, Herman, I: 82, 223, 234, 260- More Die of Heartbreak (Bellow), II: 127 261, 275; II: 5, 145, 242, 246, 258 Member of the Wedding, The "Morella" (Poe), I: 346-347, 349 Mori, Toshio, II: 229 (McCullers), II: 199-213 Member of the Wedding, The: A Play Morrison, Jim, I: 184 Morrison, Toni, I: 19-33; II: 83, 145 (McCullers), II: 200, 210 Memoirs (T Williams), I: 304, 305, 306 Mortgaged Heart, The (McCullers), II: 203 "Memories of West Street and Lepke" Mosbyys Memoirs and Other Stories (R. Lowell), II: 166, 167, 168, 170 (Bellow), II: 126 Mencken, H. L., I: 138, 158, 159; II: Moses (biblical person), I: 178, 290 25,31, 121,313 Men Without Women (Hemingway), I: "Mother" (Anderson), II: 311-312, 314 Mott, Lucretia, I: 262-263 327 Moulton, Louise Chandler, II: 83 Merimee, Prosper, I: 96 "Mouth of the Hudson, The" (R. Merrill, James, II: 176 Lowell), II: 176 Metamorphoses (Ovid), I: 368; II: 217 Moveable Feast, A (Hemingway), I: Metropolis (film), I: 81 329; II: 47-48 "Metzengerstein" (Poe), I: 340, 346, "Mr. Bruce" Qewett), II: 70 353 Mr. Sammler's Planet (Bellow), II: 127, "Mexican General, The" (Bellow), II: 134 126 "MS. Found in a Bottle" (Poe), I: 341, Mexico City Blues (Kerouac), I: 184 344-345 Miami and the Siege of Chicago Mukherjee, Bharati, II: 229 (Mailer), II: 234 Muller, Marcia, II: 56 Mid-American Chants (Anderson), II: Mura, David, II: 217 304 Murder in the Cathedral (T. S. Eliot), Middlemarch (G. Eliot), I: 146, 206, 1:360 215 Murder on the Orient Express Middleton, Thomas, I: 365 (Christie), II: 58 Miller, Arthur, I: 53-69, 122 Murfree, Mary Noailles, II: 82 Mills of the Kavanaughs, The (R. Murphy, Gerald and Sara, II: 267, 268, Lowell), II: 165, 168 282 Milne, A. A., II: 58 Mussolini, Benito, II: 1, 2, 4, 6 Milton, John, I: 214, 361; II: 15, 73, My Antonia (Gather), I: 143-162; II: 175 83 Mims, Edwin, II: 4 My Bondage and My Freedom "Minister's Black Veil, The" (Douglass), I: 163-182 (Hawthorne), I: 259 "My Last Afternoon with Uncle De"Mirage." See American Tragedy, An vereux Winslow" (R. Lowell), II: (Dreiser) 166, 173 Misfits, The (A. Miller), I: 54 "Mystification" (Poe), I: 351 Mitchell, Isaac, I: 343 Nabokov, Vladimir, I: 89-108, 234, 339 Moby-Dick (Melville), II: 145, 242 Nabokov's Dozen (Nabokov), I: 90 Modern Instance (Howells), I: 211 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer), II: 233-250 Molineux, Roland, II: 22 Naked Lunch (Burroughs), I: 73, 184 "Moloch" (Ginsberg), I: 75, 80-81 Mona in the Promised Land (Jen), II: Names, The (DeLillo), II: 286 215-232 Narration (Stein), II: 45 Monster and Other Stories, The (S. Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The Crane), I: 238 (Poe), I: 340

325

AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS « VOLUME II Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself (Douglass), I: 164-165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 175 Native Son (Wright), II: 156-157 Nature (Emerson), I: 145 Neal, John, I: 341 Near the Ocean (R. Lowell), II: 165, 166, 168, 176 "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle" (Gather), I: 144, 145 Nero, emperor of Rome, I: 362 New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985 (Warren), II: 3 New National Era, The (Douglass periodical), I: 165 Nietzsche, Friedrich, I: 110, 115; II: 246, 310 Night of the Iguana, The (T. Williams), 1:305 Night Rider (Warren), II: 2 Nikolai Gogol (Nabokov), I: 90 Nine Stories (Salinger), I: 35, 36 "91 Revere Street" (R. Lowell), II: 166, 167, 169, 170-171, 173 "Nobody Knows" (Anderson), II: 306-307, 315 Norris, Charles, II: 182, 183, 184, 185, 186 Norris, Frank, I: 147-148; II: 21, 181198 North Star, The (Douglass newspaper), I: 165, 166 Notebook (R. Lowell), II: 165 Notebook 1967-68 (R. Lowell), II: 165 Not under Forty (Jewett), I: 144, 159 "Novel Demeuble, The" (Gather), I: 151 Novels and Essays (Norris), II: 181, 187 Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978 (Warren), II: 3 Oakley, Annie, I: 138 Gates, Joyce Carol, I: 234; II: 6, 303 Obasan (Kogawa), II: 229 O'Brien, Tim, II: 246 O'Connor, Flannery, I: 30-31, 275; II: 8, 199 Octopus, The (Norris), II: 183, 186 Odyssey (Homer), I: 368 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), I: 368 Of a Fire on the Moon (Mailer), II: 234 "Of Alexander Crummell" (Du Bois), 1:284 "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" (Du Bois), I: 284, 290, 291 "Of Noses" (Sterne), I: 349 "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" (Du Bois), I: 284, 286, 288, 289, 290, 292, 299 "Of the Black Belt" (Du Bois), I: 284, 289, 293

"Of the Coming of John" (Du Bois), I: 284 "Of the Dawn of Freedom" (Du Bois), I: 284, 293 "Of the Faith of the Fathers" (Du Bois), I: 284 "Of the Meaning of Progress" (Du Bois), I: 284 "Of the Passing of the First-Born" (Du Bois), I: 284 "Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece" (Du Bois), I: 282, 283, 284 "Of the Sons of Master and Man" (Du Bois), I: 284 "Of the Sorrow Songs" (Du Bois), I: 284 "Of the Training of Black Men" (Du Bois), I: 284, 289, 293-294, 297 "Of the Wings of Atalanta" (Du Bois), I: 284, 291-296 O'Hara, John, II: 122 Old Glory, The (R. Lowell), II: 165 Old Man and the Sea, The (Hemingway), I: 322, 323 "Old Oaken Bucket, The" (Woodworth), I: 157 "Old Singers, The" Qewett), II: 74 Old Testament, I: 80-81, 178, 288 Olivier, Fernande, II: 48 Olson, Charles, II: 163 "On a Book Entitled Lolita" (Nabokov), I: 89 O'Neill, Eugene, I: 109-124 One of Ours (Gather), I: 144, 159 "On Social Plays" (A. Miller), I: 62 On the Road (Kerouac), I: 73, 84, 183197 "Open Boat, The" (S. Crane), I: 240 Operette morali (Leopardi), I: 355 O Pioneers! (Gather), I: 144; II: 83 Or Else—Poem / Poems 1968-1974 (Warren), II: 3 Orlovsky, Peter, I: 74, 82, 83 Ormonde, Czenzi, II: 56 Orpheus Descending (T. Williams), I: 304 O'Sullivan, John L., I: 264 Oswald, Lee Harvey, II: 286 Oswald's Tale (Mailer), II: 235 Otchayanie. See Despair (Nabokov) Othello (Shakespeare), I: 63 Our Mr. Wren (Lewis), I: 126 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), I: 360 "Out, Out—" (Frost), II: 84 Out Cry (T. Williams), I: 315 Out of Africa (Dinesen), I: 38 Out of the Past (film), II: 85 Ovid, I: 368, 372; II: 217, 228, 230 Ozick, Cynthia, II: 257 Paco3s Story (Heinemann), II: 246

326

"Pact, A" (Pound), I: 359 Paine, Thomas, I: 172 Pakula, Alan J., II: 262, 263 Pale Fire (Nabokov), I: 90 "Panasonic." See White Noise (DeLillo) Paradise (Morrison), I: 20, 21 Paradise Lost (Milton), I: 214; II: 15 Paretsky, Sara, II: 56 Paris France (Stein), II: 40 Parker, Charlie, I: 187 Parker, Dorothy, II: 122 Parker, Frank, II: 164 "Parsifal" (Verlaine), I: 367, 370 Parsons, Theophilus, II: 70 Partos, Frank, II: 56 Pascal, Blaise, I: 225 Pater, Walter, I: 92 Paterson (W C. Williams), I: 74 Patmore, Coventry, I: 149 Peacock, Thomas Love, I: 341, 349, 355 Pennebaker, Donn, I: 195 Perkins, Maxwell, II: 109, 122, 267, 282 "Person-to-Person" (T. Williams), I: 315 Petronius, I: 362 Phaedra (Racine; R. Lowell, trans.), II: 165 Philadelphia Negro, The: A Special Study (Du Bois), I: 284 "Philosopher, The" (Anderson), II: 304-305 Picasso (Stein), II: 40, 41, 49 Picasso, Pablo, I: 371; II: 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50 Pickwick Papers, The (Dickens), I: 348 Pierce, Franklin, I: 258, 264 Pilgrim's Progress, The (Bunyan), II: 203 Pinter, Harold, I: 366 Pipkin, Charles W, II: 4 Pit, The (Norris), II: 182, 183, 186 "Pit and the Pendulum, The" (Poe), I: 351 Place in the Sun, A (film), II: 32 Place to Come To, A (Warren), II: 3 Planet News (Ginsberg), I: 72 Plath, Sylvia, I: 51, 85; II: 165, 166, 175, 176 Plato, I: 295, 341, 350; II: 295 Plato Papers, The (Ackroyd), I: 356 Playback (Chandler), II: 56 Play Days: A Book of Stories for Children Qewett), II: 70 Players (DeLillo), II: 286 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Morrison), I: 20,32 "Plea for Romantic Fiction, A" (Norris), II: 187

INDEX Plutonian Ode, and Other Poems (Ginsberg), I: 72 Pnin (Nabokov), I: 90 Podvig. See Glory (Nabokov) Poe, Edgar Allan, I: 94, 96, 275, 339358; II: 159 Poems and Problems (Nabokov), I: 90 Poems 1938-1949 (R. Lowell), II: 165 Poems of These States (Ginsberg), I: 72 Poetics (Aristotle), I: 110 Poetry and Tales (Poe), I: 355 "Poker Night, The" (T. Williams), I: 311 Pollock, Jackson, I: 74 Pompey the Great, I: 354 Poor White (Anderson), II: 304 Pope, Alexander, I: 169, 365, 367 Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, The (Parker, ed.), II: 122 "Portrait of a Lady" (T. S. Eliot), I: 215 Portrait of a Lady, The (H. James), I: 199-218 Portrait of a Lady, The (film), I: 216 Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (Picasso painting), II: 39 Portrait of the Artist (Joyce), I: 186 Pound, Ezra, I: 72, 74, 359, 362, 372; II: 37, 163 "Power of Money in Bourgeois Society, The" (Marx), II: 193 "Predicament, A" (Poe), I: 351 Presidential Papers, The (Mailer), II: 234, 243 Presley, Elvis, II: 288, 292 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), I: 203 Priglashenie na kazn'. See Invitation to a Beheading (Nabokov) Prometheus Bound (R. Lowell), II: 165 Promises: Poems 1954-1956 (Warren), 11:3 "Prothalamion" (Spenser), I: 367 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The (publication), I: 289, 299 Proud Flesh (Warren), II: 2, 4 Proust, Marcel, I: 99, 100 "Public Garden, The" (R. Lowell), II: 176 Pudd'nhead Wilson (Twain), I: 3 Pull My Daisy (Frank), I: 184 Pushkin, Alexander, I: 90 Pynchon, Thomas, II: 145 Q.E.D. (Stein), II: 38 Queen, Ellery, II: 64 "Queen's Twin, The" (Jewett), II: 83 Queen's Twin and Other Stories, The (Jewett), II: 70 Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy (Updike), I: 219, 220, 221, 234 Rabbit at Rest (Updike), I: 219, 220

Rabbit Is Rich (Updike), I: 219, 220 "Rabbit-Pen, The" (Anderson), II: 304 Rabbit Redux (Updike), I: 219, 220 Rabbit, Run (Updike), I: 219-236 Racine, II: 165 Radcliffe, Ann, I: 343 Rahv, Philip, II: 127 Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (Salinger), I: 35, 36 Rake, The (Dreiser), II: 22 Ransom, John Crowe, II: 2, 3, 107, 164 Rape of the Lock, The (Pope), I: 365 Ratner's Star (DeLillo), II: 286, 293 Ravelstein (Bellow), II: 127 Raven and Other Poems, The (Poe), I: 340 Reality Sandwiches (Ginsberg), I: 72 Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The (Nabokov), I: 89, 90 Red Badge of Courage, The (S. Crane), I: 237-255 Red House Mystery, The (Milne), II: 58 Reflections in a Golden Eye (McCullers), II: 200, 201, 202 Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu) (Proust), I: 99-100 "Respectability" (Anderson), II: 312 Responsibilities of the Novelist, The (Norris), II: 183 Rexroth, Kenneth, I: 74, 75, 84 Rich, Adrienne, II: 75, 176 Richards, I. A., II: 40 Richardson, Samuel, II: 41 Richeson, Clarence, II: 22-23 "Rill from the Town Pump, A" (Hawthorne), I: 259 Rimbaud, Arthur, I: 74, 187 Rising Tide of Color, The (Stoddard), II: 111 Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) (Stravinsky), I: 371 "River Driftwood" (Jewett), II: 81 Robert d'Artois (Norris), II: 184 Rockefeller, John D., I: 283 Roderick Hudson (H. James), I: 200 Rodriguez, Richard, II: 217 Rohmer, Sax, II: 229 "Romantic Egotist, The" (Fitzgerald), II: 268 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), I: 44 Roosevelt, Eleanor, I: 63 Roosevelt, Franklin, II: 1-2, 164 Roosevelt, Theodore, II: 74 Rose, Francis, II: 39-40 Rossen, Robert, II: 6 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, I: 110 Rothstein, Arnold, II: 116

327

Roudane, Matthew C, I: 56 Rousseau, Henri, II: 48 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, I: 96 Rubaiydt of Omar Khayyam (E. FitzGerald, trans.), I: 297 Rubenstein, Richard L., II: 253, 257 Rumor of War, A (Caputo), II: 246 Rumor Verified: Poems 1979-1980 (Warren), II: 3 "Run-Away Plot, The" (Douglass), I: 177, 178 Running Dog (DeLillo), II: 286, 293 Rushdie, Salman, I: 234 Ruth Hall (Fern), I: 258 Sacre du printemps, Le. See Rite of Spring (Stravinsky) Sacred Wood, The: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (T. S. Eliot), I: 360, 361 "Salesman at Fifty" (A. Miller), I: 67 Salesman in Beijing (A. Miller), I: 55, 66-67 Salinger, J. D., I: 16, 35-52 Salmon, Andre, II: 48 Santayana, George, II: 171 Santos, Bienvenido, II: 229 Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Jewett), I: 144, 159 Satyricon (Petronius), I: 362 Sayers, Dorothy, II: 59 Sayre, Rosalind, II: 269 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 1:149, 257-279; II: 70, 83 Schopenhauer, Arthur, I: 110 Schwartz, Delmore, II: 127, 171-172 Schwartz, Jonas, II: 141 Scott, Sir Walter, I: 3, 164; II: 184 Scudder, Horace, II: 71 "Scythe of Time, The" (Poe), I: 351, 352 Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (Warren), II: 3 Seize the Day (Bellow), II: 126, 128 Selby, Hubert, Jr., I: 30 Selected Essays (Warren), II: 3 Selected Poems (R. Lowell), II: 165 Selected Poems: New and Old 19231966 (Warren), II: 3 Selected Poems: 1923-1943 (Warren), 11:2 Selected Poems, 1947-1995 (Ginsberg), I: 72, 85 Selected Writings (Marx), II: 194 Self-Consciousness (Updike), I: 220, 221 "Self-Reliance" (Emerson), I: 206 "Self-Seeker, The" (Frost), II: 84 "Servant to Servants, A" (Frost), II: 84 Set This House on Fire (Styron), II: 252 "Seven Tales of My Native Land" (Hawthorne), I: 257

AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS # VOLUME II Sevier, Valentine, I: 304 Sex and Character (Weininger), II: 43 Sexton, Anne, II: 165, 166, 176 Shadow and Act (Ellison), II: 146 "Shadow—A Parable" (Poe), I: 345, 353 "Shadow of the Gods, The" (A. Miller), 1:61 Shadows on the Rock (Jewett), I: 144 Shakespeare, William, I: 9, 10, 44, 110, 117, 118, 119, 186, 298, 317-318, 365-366, 367, 371; II: 63, 129, 140, 153, 258 Shaw, George Bernard, I: 110, 131, 136 Shaw, Irwin, II: 235 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, I: 72, 73, 229; II: 172 Shepard, Sam, I: 122 Shining, The (King), I: 344 "Significance of the Frontier in American History, The" (Turner), I: 145 "Signora Zenobia, The" (Poe), I: 351 "Silence—A Fable" (Poe), I: 353 "Simple Art of Murder, The" (Chandler), II: 58, 60 Simpson, Louis, I: 78 Simpsons, The (television series), I: 339 Sinclair, Upton, I: 126 "Siope—A Fable" (Poe), I: 353-354 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), I: 144, 160; II: 20,21 Sitwell, Edith, II: 40, 165 "Skunk Hour" (R. Lowell), II: 166, 170, 173, 174, 175 Small Craft Warnings (T. Williams), I: 306 Smart, Christopher, I: 75, 76 Smiley, Jane, I: 16 Smith, Gerrit, I: 165, 166, 180 Smith, Horace, I: 353, 354 Smith, James M'Cune, I: 168-169 Smith, Johnston (pseudonym). See Crane, Stephen Snodgrass, W. D., II: 163, 165 Snyder, Gary, I: 75, 184, 195 Socrates, I: 290 Soglyadatay. See Eye, The (Nabokov) Solomon, Carl, I: 74, 79, 82, 83 Something to Remember Me By (Bellow), II: 127 "Song of Myself" (Whitman), II: 145 Song of Solomon (biblical book), I: 289 Song of Solomon (Morrison), I: 20 "Song of the Bride" (Wagner), I: 297 Song of the Lark, The (Gather), I: 144 Songs of Innocence and Experience (Blake), I: 85 Sophie's Choice (Styron), II: 251-265 Sophie's Choice (film), II: 262 Sophie's Choice (opera), II: 263

"Sophie's Choice: A Memory" (Styron), II: 252 "Sophistication" (Anderson), II: 308, 313 Sophocles, I: 368 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), I: 281-301; II: 151 Southey, Robert, II: 46 "Souvenir" (Dreiser), II: 30 Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (Nabokov), I: 90, 99 Speer, Albert, II: 293 Spengler, Oswald, I: 187; II: 246 Spenser, Edmund, I: 367 Spillane, Mickey, II: 58 Spoils of Poynton, The (H. James), I: 200 Spooky Art, The: Some Thoughts on Writing (Mailer), II: 233, 235, 238, 241, 244 Spoon River Anthology (Masters), II: 313,315 "Spring's Welcome" (Lyly), I: 366 Square Root of Wonderful, The (McCullers), II: 200 Stafford, Jean, II: 164 Stalin, Joseph, II: 1,6 Stallings, Laurence, II: 121 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, I: 180, 262263 Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems, 1929-1933 (Stein), II: 41 Starbuck, George, II: 165 Stein, Gertrude, I: 321; II: 37-53 Steinbeck, John, II: 216, 233, 239 Steiner, George, II: 253, 254 Stendhal, I: 110 Sternberg, Josef von, II: 31 Sterne, Laurence, I: 349; II: 258 Stevens, George, II: 32 Stevens, Thaddeus, I: 180 Stevens, Wallace, I: 72 Stirner, Max, I: 110 Stoddard, Elizabeth, I: 275 Stoddard, Lothrop, II: 111 Stoic, The (Dreiser), II: 21 Stone, Robert, II: 246 "Story of a Book, The" (Stein), II: 41, 49 Story Teller's Story, A (Anderson), II: 304, 314 Stout, Rex, II: 64 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, I: 16, 125, 177, 213, 260, 261, 275, 286 Strange Interlude (O'Neill), I: 110 Strangers on a Train (Highsmith; Chandler, Ormonde, and Cook, screenplay), II: 56 Strasberg, Lee, II: 31 Stravinsky, Igor, I: 371

328

Streetcar Named Desire, A (T. Williams), I: 56, 303-320 "Strength of God, The" (Anderson), 11:305,311 Strindberg, August, I: 110, 122 Strong Opinions (Nabokov), I: 91, 92, 95,99 Studs Lonigan (Farrell), II: 233 Styron, William, II: 251-265 "Sucker" (McCullers), II: 200 Suddenly Last Summer (T. Williams), 1:311 Sula (Morrison), I: 20 Summer (Wharton), II: 84, 89, 90 Sumner, Charles, I: 180 Sumner, William Graham, I: 239-240 Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway), I: 321-337 "Sunflower Sutra" (Ginsberg), I: 83 "Supermarket in California, A" (Ginsberg), I: 83 Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, The (Du Bois), I: 284 Sweet Bird of Youth (T. Williams), I: 304, 305, 306, 314 Swift, Jonathan, I: 349, 354 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, I: 94, 110 Symposium (Plato), I: 341 "Tale in Imitation of the German, A" (Poe), I: 346 "Tale of Jerusalem, A" (Poe), I: 340, 353, 354 "Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed, A" (O'Neill), I: 109 Tales of New England (Jewett), II: 70 Tales of the Early Ages (H. Smith), I: 353 Tales of the Folio Club (Poe), I: 341, 345, 349 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Poe), I: 339-358 Tales of the Jazz Age (Fitzgerald), II: 110,268 Tamerlane and Other Poems (Poe), I: 340 Tan, Amy, II: 229 Taps at Reveille (Fitzgerald), II: 111, 268 Tar Baby (Morrison), I: 20 Tate, Allen, II: 2, 3, 164, 165 "Teacher, The" (Anderson), II: 307, 311 Teller's Tales, The (S. Anderson; Gado, ed.), II: 314 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), I: 366 Tender Buttons (Stein), II: 39 Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald), II: 110, 122,267-284 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, I: 201, 372

INDEX Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Hardy), I: 157 Thaxter, Celia, II: 83 Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, The (A. Miller), I: 55, 61, 62 Theft, A (Bellow), II: 127 "There Was a Child Went Forth" (Whitman), II: 230 Things as They Are. See Q.E.D. (Stein) Things They Carried, The (O'Brien), II: 246 "Thinker, The" (Anderson), II: 308, 312-313, 315 Thirst, and Other One Act Plays (O'Neill), I: 110 Thirty-Six Poems (Warren), II: 2 This Quiet Dust (Styron), II: 254 This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald), II: 109,110,268,269,273 Thompson, Hunter S., I: 51 Thomson, Virgil, II: 40 Thoreau, Henry David, I: 139, 147, 187, 225, 275; II: 79 Three Lives: Stories of Good Anna, Melanctha, and the Gentle Lena (Stein), II: 38, 39, 43 Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche), I: 115 Ticknor, William D., I: 258, 259, 260 Tidewater Morning, A (Styron), II: 253 Tillman, Benjamin, I: 298, 299 Timebends: A Life (A. Miller), I: 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 65 Time of Our Time, The (Mailer), II: 235 Titan, The (Dreiser), II: 20 Titian, I: 204 "To a Nightingale" (Keats), I: 366 "To Delmore Schwartz" (R. Lowell), II: 166, 171-172 "To Elsie" (W C. Williams), I: 75 "To His Coy Mistress" (Marvell), I: 367 To Jerusalem and Back (Bellow), II: 127 Toklas, Alice, II: 37-48, 50 Tolstoy, Leo, I: 146; II: 106, 233, 242, 245, 246 Tory Lover, The (Jewett), II: 85 "To Speak of the Woe That Is in Marriage" (R. Lowell), II: 174 Town and the City, The (Kerouac), I: 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188 "Town Poor, The" Qewett), II: 84 "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (T. S. Eliot), I: 361 "Transatlantic Interview" (Stein with Haas), II: 38, 42 Traveler at Forty, A (Dreiser), II: 20 Trilling, Lionel, I: 73, 74, 95; II: 107

Trilogy of Desire, A (Dreiser), II: 21 Tristan und Isolde (Wagner), I: 363 Triumph of the Egg, The (Anderson), II: 304 "True History" (Lucian), I: 355 "True Reward of the Novelist, The" (Norris), II: 181 Turner, Frederick Jackson, I: 143, 144, 145 Turner, Nat, I: 165, 177 Turn of the Screw, The (H. James), I: 200 Twain, Mark, I: 1-17, 139, 178, 180, 223, 283, 285; II: 80 Twice-Told Tales (Hawthorne), I: 257, 258, 259 Two-Character Play, The (T. Williams), 1:315 "Two Morning Monologues" (Bellow), II: 126 Typical American Qen), II: 215-216, 217 Tzara, Tristan, II: 48 Ulysses Qoyce), I: 29, 365; II: 130-131, 270 "Ulysses" (Tennyson), I: 201 "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" (T. S. Eliot), I: 365 Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (Harris), I: 1 Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe), I: 16, 125, 177, 213, 260 Uncle Vanya (Chekhov), I: 315 Understanding Fiction (Warren and Brooks), II: 2 Understanding Poetry (Warren and Brooks), II: 2 Under the Red, White and Blue. See Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald) Underworld (DeLillo), II: 286 "Unparalled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, The" (Poe), I: 355 Unseen, The (Chandler and Wilde, screenplay), II: 56 "Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron, An" (W Irving), I: 343 Upanishads, I: 371 Updike, John, I: 139, 219-236 Up from Slavery (B. Washington), I: 290

U.S.A. (Dos Passos), II: 233 Valley of Decision, The (Wharton), II: 90

Van Dine, S. S., II: 64 Van Doren, Mark, I: 73, 74 Vandover and the Brute (Norris), II: 182, 183, 185, 186 "Vanishing Red, The" (Frost), II: 84 Van Petten, John Bullock, I: 241 Veblen, Thorstein, I: 136

329

Vegetable, The; or, From President to Postman (Fitzgerald), II: 109, 110 "Veille de Noel, Une" (Kerouac), I: 85-86 Verdenal, Jean, I: 363 Verlaine, Paul, I: 367 Verne, Jules, I: 354 Verses (Jewett), II: 70 Vesey, Denmark, I: 177 Victim, The (Bellow), II: 126, 128 Vieux Carre (T. Williams), I: 305, 306 View from the Bridge, A (A. Miller), I: 62 "Village Virus, The" (Lewis), I: 126 Virgil, I: 75, 147 "Visionary, The" (Poe), I: 346 Visions of Cody (Kerouac), I: 186 Visions of Gerard (Kerouac), 1:184,185 Vollmer, Joan, I: 191 Volshebnik (Nabokov), I: 89-90 "Von Jung" (Poe), I: 351-352 von Tilzer, Harry, II: 190 Vosburgh, R. G., I: 248 Wagner, Richard, I: 297, 363, 368 "Waking in the Blue" (R. Lowell), II: 166 Walden (Thoreau), II: 79 Waldman, Ann, I: 72, 85 Walk in the Sun, A (H. Brown), II: 234 Wallace, Lew, I: 138 Walpole, Horace, I: 343 Walpole, Hugh, I: 138 War and Peace (Tolstoy), II: 245 Warhol, Andy, I: 306 War Is Kind (S. Crane), I: 238 Warner, Jack, II: 66 Warner, Susan, I: 260, 261 Warren, Henry Clarke, I: 372 Warren, Robert Penn, II: 1-18,164,169 Wars I Have Seen (Stein), II: 40, 42 Washington, Booker T, I: 283, 284, 287, 289-291, 294, 295, 296; II: 149, 150-151 Washington, Madison, I: 177 Waste Land, The (T. S. Eliot), I: 71, 81, 359-374; II: 113, 150, 163 Watch and Ward (H. James), I: 200 "Water Faucet Vision, The" (Jen), II: 216 "Way of the Warrior, The" (Styron), II: 251, 252-253 Webster, John, I: 364 Webster, Noah, I: 3 Weininger, Otto, II: 40, 43 Wells, H. G, I: 354; II: 40 Wells, Ida B., I: 165 Welty, Eudora, I: 147; II: 199 West, James L. W, III, II: 262 West, Rebecca, I: 138 Weston, Jessie L., I: 364, 367, 372

AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS * VOLUME II Whalen, Philip, I: 75, 195 Wharton, Edith, I: 234; II: 37, 83-84, 89-108, 186 What Maine Knew (H. James), I: 200 "What the Thunder Said" (T. S. Eliot), I: 362, 369-371 Wheatstraw, Peter, II: 155, 156 White, Ethel Lina, II: 56 White, Thomas Willis, I: 340, 348 White, William Allen, I: 138 White Devily The (J. Webster), I: 364 Whitehead, Albert North, II: 40, 43 White Heron and Other Stones, A (Jewett), II: 70 "White Negro, The" (Mailer), II: 234 White Noise (DeLillo), II: 285-301 White Shroud (Ginsberg), I: 72 Whitman, Walt, I: 74, 75, 76, 80, 83, 85, 139, 172, 178, 179,187, 234, 239, 241, 275, 285, 359, 361; II: 131, 145, 172, 216, 230 Whittier, John Greenleaf, I: 275 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Albee), I: 122 Who's Irish? Stories (Jen), II: 216 Who Speaks for the Negro? (Warren), 11:3 Why Are We in Vietnam? (Mailer), II: 234 "Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling" (Poe), I: 340, 352 Wide, Wide World, The (Warner), I: 260 Wiesel, Elie, II: 253, 254, 257 Wilde, Hagar, II: 56 Wilde, Oscar, I: 91, 92, 110, 356 Wilder, Billy, II: 56 Wilder, Thornton, I: 310; II: 40

Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War (Warren), II: 3 Wilkins, Mary, II: 83 Williams, Rose Isabel, I: 304, 305, 306 Williams, Tennessee, I: 56, 122, 303320; II: 199, 210 Williams, William Carlos, I: 74, 75, 77, 80, 83; II: 163, 164, 165 "William's Wedding" (Jewett), II: 83 "William Wilson" (Poe), I: 343-344, 352 Willie Stark (Floyd opera), II: 3 Willis, N. P., I: 350 Wilson, Edmund, I: 342; II: 122, 246 Windy McPherson's Son (Anderson), II: 303, 304 Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson), II: 303317 Winfrey, Oprah, I: 32 Wings of the Dove, The (H. James), I: 200 Winner, Michael, II: 67 Winner Take Nothing (Hemingway), I: 323 "Winter Drive, A" Qewett), II: 69 Winters, Shelley, II: 32 With Love and Squalor (essay collection), I: 51 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, II: 40 Wolf, The (Norris), II: 186 Wolfe, Thomas, I: 186; II: 233, 234, 242, 316 Woman Warrior, The: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (Kingston), II: 229 Women, Beware Women (Middleton), 1:365 Wong, Jade Snow, II: 229 Woodworth, Samuel T, I: 157

330

Woollcott, Alexander, II: 58 Wordsworth, William, I: 72, 75; II: 165 "World and the Jug, The" (Ellison), II: 157 World Enough and Time (Warren), II: 3 World So Wide (Lewis), I: 127 Wren, Sir Christopher, I: 372 Wright, James, II: 176 Wright, Richard, I: 30; II: 146, 156157, 201, 216 "Wunderkind" (McCullers), II: 200 Withering Heights (E. Bronte), I: 157, 203; II: 106 Yearsley, Ann, II: 46 Yeats, W B., I: 74, 365 Yerkes, Charles Tyson, II: 21 Yes Is for a Very Young Man (Stein), 11:39 You, Emperors, and Others: Poems 1957-1960 (Warren), II: 3 Young, Lester, I: 87 "Young Folks, The" (Salinger), I: 36 "Young Goodman Brown" (Hawthorne), I: 259 Young Lions, The (I. Shaw), II: 235 "Youth" (Conrad), I: 146 Yvernelle: A Legend of Feudal France (Norris), II: 182, 184, 185 Zangwill, Israel, I: 143 Zashchita Luzhina. See Defense, The (Nabokov) Zillah: A Tale of the Holy City (H. Smith), I: 354 Zola, fimile, I: 110, 241; II: 181, 186, 187 "Zola as a Romantic Writer" (Norris), II: 187

A Complete Listing of Authors in AMERICAN WRITERS Abbey, Edward Acker, Kathy Adams, Henry Addams, Jane Agee, James Aiken, Conrad Albee, Edward Alcott, Louisa May Algren, Nelson Alvarez, Julia Ammons, A. R Anderson, Sherwood Angelou, Maya Ashbery, John Atwood, Margaret Auchincloss, Louis Auden, W. H Auster, Paul Baker, Nicholson Baldwin, James Baldwin, James Bambara, Toni Cade Banks, Russell Baraka, Amiri Barlow, Joel Barnes, Djuna Earth, John

Berry, Wendell Berryman, John

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Bierce, Ambrose Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth

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Bogan, Louise Bourne, Randolph

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Bowles, Paul

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Bradbury, Ray Bradstreet, Anne Brodsky, Joseph Brooks, Gwendolyn Brooks, Van Wyck Brown, Charles Brockden Bryant, William Cullen Buck, Pearl S

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Buechner, Frederick

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Burke, Kenneth Burroughs, William S Butler, Octavia Butler, Robert Olen

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Blackmur, R. P. Ely, Robert

Boyle, T. C

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Caldwell, Erskine

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Cameron, Peter

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Capote, Truman

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Barthelme, Frederick

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Carver, Raymond

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Bausch, Richard

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Beattie, Ann

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Gather, Willa

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Bell, Madison Smartt

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Gather, Willa

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AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS « VOLUME II Chopin, Kate Chopin, Kate Cisneros, Sandra Clampitt, Amy Coleman, Wanda Cooper, James Fenimore Coover, Robert Corso, Gregory Cowley, Malcolm Cozzens, James Gould Crane, Hart Crane, Hart Crane, Stephen

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Cullen, Countee

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Cummings, E. E

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DeLillo, Don

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Dickey, James

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Dickinson, Emily Dickinson, Emily Didion, Joan Dillard, Annie Dixon, Stephen Dobyns, Stephen Doctorow, E. L Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.) Dos Passos, John

Eberhart, Richard Edwards, Jonathan

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Eliot, T. S

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Eliot, T. S Elkin, Stanley

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Ellison, Ralph

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo Epstein, Leslie Erdrich, Louise

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Fante, John

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Farrell, James T.

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Faulkner, William

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Faulkner, William

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Fiedler, Leslie Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott

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Fitzgerald, Zelda

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Ford, Richard

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Franklin, Benjamin

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Fuller, Margaret

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Garrett, George

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Doty, Mark

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Dreiser, Theodore Dreiser, Theodore

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Harjo, Joy Harrison, Jim Harte, Bret Hass, Robert Hawthorne, Nathaniel

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Hayden, Robert

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Hearon, Shelby

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Hecht, Anthony

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Heller, Joseph

James, William Jarrell, Randall Jeffers, Robinson Jewett, Sarah Orne Jewett, Sarah Orne Johnson, Charles Jones, James Jong, Erica Justice, Donald Karr, Mary Kazin, Alfred Kennedy, William

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Kerouac, Jack

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Hijuelos, Oscar

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Kumin, Maxine

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Hoffman, Alice

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Kunitz, Stanley

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Kushner, Tony

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Hogan, Linda Holmes, Oliver Wendell Howe, Irving Howe, Susan Howells, William Dean Hughes, Langston Hughes, Langston

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Hugo, Richard

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Lewis, Sinclair

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Irving, John

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Lindsay, Vachel

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London, Jack

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James, Henry

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AMERICAN WRITERS CLASSICS * VOLUME II Lowell, Amy Lowell, James Russell Lowell, Robert Lowell, Robert McCarthy, Cormac

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McCarthy, Mary

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McClatchy, J. D

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Nabokov, Vladimir

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Mailer, Norman

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Mailer, Norman

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Malamud, Bernard

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Gates, Joyce Carol

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Olsen, Tillie

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Melville, Herman

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Mencken, H. L Merrill, James Merton, Thomas Merwin, W. S

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Poe, Edgar Allan

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Roth, Philip

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Tan, Amy

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Wilbur, Richard Wideman, John Edgar

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Williams, Tennessee

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Williams, William Carlos

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Warren, Robert Penn

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Welty, Eudora Welty, Eudora West, Nathanael West, Nathanael Wharton, Edith Wharton, Edith White, E. B Whitman, Walt Whitman, Walt Whittier, John Greenleaf

Wilson, August Wilson, Edmund

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Wolff, Tobias

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Wright, Charles

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Wright, James

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Wright, Richard

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Wylie, Elinor

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Yates, Richard

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Zukofsky, Louis

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