He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do ...not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I am useless, one more girl who couldn't be sold. When I visit the family now, I wrap my American successes around me like a pr...ivate shawl. I am worthy of eating the food. From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say, "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls," because that is what one says about daughters. But I watched such words come out of my own mother's and father's mouths; I looked at their ink drawing of poor people snagging their neighbors' flotage with long flood hooks and pushing the girl babies on down the river. And I had to get out of hating range. I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, "Girls are necessary too"; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession. Perhaps it was a saying in another village.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With importa...nt connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes--McCarthy and Stalin--that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a litera...ry aristocracy of one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And all the great traditions of the Past They saw reflected in the coming time....
And thus forever with reverted look The mystic volume of the world they read, Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book, Till life became a Legend of the Dead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is beautiful indeed; the colored people have given this to the head of the government, and that government once sanctioned la...ws that would not permit its people to learn enough to enable them to read this book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »