Third List of Addenda to Guide to Manuscripts Relating to America in Great Britain and Ireland

Previous Lists of Addenda were published in the Bulletin, New Series, Nos. 5 and 7. The present list has been prepared by the Editor of the Guide, Professor B. R. Crick, with the help of Mrs. Naomi Connelly.

A Southern Drawl from beyond the Grave

The bell has finally tolled for Flannery O'Connor. The National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize have both passed up the opportunity to honor her posthumous collection of short stories, Everything that Rises Must Converge. Still, you can't help wondering what best-sellerdom could have done to a book like this. Few will read it through and most of those who stop at the halfway mark will become rabid anti-O'Connorites. Of all the first-rate American writers of the century, she is the easiest to put down. Her characters are self-conciously larger than life, her prose laden with portent in every semi-colon, her plotting so relentlessly tragic that every sentence is like a step – inevitable and often predictable – toward a witches' brew of a Grand Guignol finale. Impatient readers will feel Flannery is getting nowhere pretty slow. After some stirring and simmering of emotions, they'll quit and stop reading short of the climax, with the worst possible results. An O'Connor story is not one of those “New Yorker” Flirtations that ramble charmingly and stop coquettishly: Flannery O'Connor is no playful, teasing minx.

Versions of Immobility: The Contemporary American Writer and the Jewish Tradition

The “Jewishness” of recent American fiction has already been well explored. But discussion of the work of Jewish writers tends to be retrospective: it leads back to the shtetl and the shlemiel without considering how “Americanised” Jewish forms and themes have become. Clearly, recent authors such as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow are indebted to a fund of “Jewish experience”. But their novels are “American”, far more concerned with twentieth-century urban problems than with the enclosed life of the traditional Jewish community. This essay therefore attempts to assess how far “Jewish” localised material has been translated into specifically “American” terms.

An Emigrant's Letter from Iowa, 1871

John Flounders Dixon was born in 1844 at Crathorne, near Yarm, in the Cleveland district south of the Tees in the North Riding of Yorkshire and was thus 27 years of age in 1871 when he made the journey to America described by him in the following letter. His companions were his younger brother, Charles Albert, aged 22, and Frank Standing to whose uncle's farm in Iowa they travelled.

An Anglo-American Cooperative Project of the 1870's: The Mississippi Valley Trading Company

No student of American agrarian history in the third quarter of the nineteenth century will neglect the Patrons of Husbandry. From a number of well-documented accounts he may learn how in 1867, in Washington, D.C., their Order was founded to enrich the cultural life of farmers and their wives, and how their association in Granges moved them instead to express the chronic discontents of agricultural producers as a body. Even better-known is the ground of those discontents, which temporarily united the cotton, sugar and tobacco farmers of the South with the corn raisers of Kansas and Nebraska and with the wheat producers of Minnesota and the Dakotas. In a physically depleted land, and under a system subservient to the business needs of the victorious north and east, the farmer of the Mississippi Valley found himself in thrall to the distant manufacturer and to the local merchant by credit arrangements frequently entailing a crop-lien system. In order to rid himself of this bondage, to put himself instead upon a firm basis of cash buying and selling, and to develop a more diversified agriculture, the farmer required – as the Patrons repeatedly insisted – an alternative source of capital to the eastern banker.

The Critics at the Harmonium: Blackmur and Winters on Stevens

It is nothing new to find critics disagreeing about a poet. What does not seem to be generally recognized, however, is that such disagreements can shed light on the work under consideration. Certainly this is the case with Wallace Stevens. The key essays on this great and difficult poet remain those by R.P. Blackmur and Yvor Winters, and they each represent a possible approach to his writings. Blackmur adopts a texrural approach, concerned mainly with Stevens's language; while Winters discusses his ideas and the nature of his themes.