Nonfiction

November 9, 1981 Late Monday afternoon It is not yet 5 p.m. now and already near to completely dark, just the sky is still that deep dark blue just before it becomes black. Much to write about, though I have been avoiding sitting down here. What first? The good news or the bad? Last Tuesday…

On a spring day in 1945, not long before his 12th birthday, Bud Gardner headed out to plow his father's fields. His younger brother Gilbert came along for the ride. Sandy, the boys' sister, lingered within earshot. Gilbert climbed on the cultpacker, a two ton machine which, towed in the tractor's wake, crushed the freshly…

     Wanting to try her hand at literature, she had taken it into her head to fashion willy-nilly novels, letters, comedies, and other nonsense like that. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, IX In 1955, two hundred years after Madame Louise d'Epinay began planning an autobiographical novel, it was finally published in its original form. Seeing an earlier version,…

RINGS: ON THE LIFE OF COLLIS PHILLIPS recounts the experience of an ex-boxing champion and trainer who has lived most of his seventy-five years in the Saint Bernard housing project in New Orleans. It is based on personal experience, three years of research, letters, legal documents, hospital and prison records, newspaper reports, and scores of…

EVENT: The caretaking lady next door was horsing around with the horse who wanted to kick her because he had a sore she was trying to put something on. It's an old Morgan, swaybacked, still beautiful in head and stride, but bored in retirement. It will come to the fence to say hello even to…

This conversation took place in Philip Levine's home near the Tufts University campus where he teaches each autumn. During the winter and summer months, he and his wife Frances live in Fresno, California, although in the winter of 1985 Philip Levine will be a visiting professor at Brown University. Levine's Selected Poems was published in…

Andrew Lytle, who has recently attained his eightieth birthday, is one of the most original and significant figures in Southern letters. To those who know him and his work, such a statement is a truism; but Lytle's writing is not so widely known, nor his place in the region's literary history so secure, that his…

Shelby Foote is the author of six novels – Tournament, Follow Me Down, Love in a Dry Season, Shiloh, Jordan County, and September September – as well as his magnificent historical work in three large volumes, The Civil War: A Narrative, which is already considered a classic. Mr. Foote lives in Memphis, Tennessee, where he…

Halliday: When I think about your two books, and the poems that I know will be in your third book, I seem to see a movement away from autobiographical material toward poems in which the characters are distinct from yourself – Nijinsky, Ellen West. Do you see a "story" of your choice of subjects for…