Table of Contents

Books and Men essays, in which accomplished writers guide readers in and around the works and personalities of other accomplished writers, have long been among the ATLANTIC’S most popular features. In the following twenty-five pages, we present a Books and Men bonus, a tour of four of the major literary edifices of our time and a side trip backward to the days when Victoria ruled the mores.

A Literary Excursion

Nabokov the Magician

A distinguished novelist gently pins the day's most enigmatically provocative writer to the butterfly board and, admiringly, limns his talent.

ELIZABETH JANEWAY

66

The Agitated Heart

Novelist, Harvard professor, and friend of Robert Frost’s (the author's wife was the poet’s secretary for twenty-five years), Mr. Morrison examines as only a close associate can the “pairs of opposites" that fed the great poet's talents.

THEODORE MORRISON

72

Edmund Wilson: His Life and Books

Writer and critic examines novelist and critic with a fine eye and sharp ear, and discovers how with his first youthful travels and note-jolting Wilson “trained himself . . . to recognize the world, to divest it of its strangeness, to make it ready for him.”

ALFRED KAZIN

80

Auden at Sixty

One poet’s birthday homage to “our foremost poet,”in whose work a professor of English at Hunter finds traced ”the moral history of the past forty years.”

JOHN HOLLANDER

84

In the Days of the Bric-a-Brac Queen

The kind of optimism that buoyed Britain and much of Europe between 1815 and 1914 may have been unjustified, but it was fun while it lasted. Today, in contrast, people are called optimists for thinking that next year will be no worse than this year.

LOUIS KRONENBERGER

88