March 1966
In This Issue
Explore the March 1966 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
Marlon Brando: An American Hero
Fourth of July in Maine
(For Harriet Winslow)
The Boiler Room
A desolate army base in upstate New York is the setting for this extraordinary story of a troubled young soldier who presides, helplessly, over his own disintegration. The author, who makes his fiction debut with this Atlantic “First,” is Rudolph Wurlitzer, a twenty-nine-year-old New Yorker, veteran, and one-time student at Columbia University. A free-lance writer for films and television, Wurlitzer is at work on a novel.
Chamber Music, Bar Harbor, Off-Season
British Guiana
A Gourmet's Guide to Europe
The Real Cultural Article
PETER DAVISON is the director of the Atlantic Monthly Press and author of BREAKING OF THE DAY AND OTHER POEMS.
Compliance
The Hero Bullet and Other Related Nonsense
A Boston University graduate, JACK BELCK is now working on his master’s degree in journalism at the University of West Virginia.
Incantation
Sardinia
Originality and Success
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Reader's Choice
Potpourri
Puerto Rico
Norway
What Makes Opera Run
Of the nearly four thousand operas that have been produced on stage, only forty or fifty have survived in current repertory. Boston Symphony conductor Erich Leinsdorf was for many years a conductor of opera at the Metropolitan in New York and abroad. In this first of two articles he writes about the shortcomings and the virtues that spell failure or enduring popularity.
Operas That Survive
Washington
Where I Stand
As Attorney General of Massachusetts, Mr. Brooke, forty-six, fills the highest elective post held by a Negro in the United States. If he wins the Senate seat being vacated by Leverett Saltonstall, he will be the first Negro senator since Reconstruction days. A Republican who now must declare himself on major national and foreign policy issues, he takes his stand in THE CHALLENGE OF CHANGE. to be published soon by Little, Brown. In this article Mr. Brooke gives his proposals for solving some of the most pressing of America’s problems at home.
Africa's Answer to Schweitzer
Though he was a man of legendary virtues, did Albert Schweitzer really understand the Africans among whom he lived for much of his life? Not sufficiently, says the distinguished diplomat and writer Conor Cruise O’Brien, and many in Europe and America share the late doctor’s narrow and incurious opinions about Africans. This essay grows out of Mr. O’Brien s experience as a major UN political adviser during the Congo explosion and his three years as vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana. He is now Regents Professor and Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at New York University.
The Small College: Another View
They can experiment freely, get out of ruts more quickly, provide teachers who teach. These and many more are the attributes of the small liberal arts colleges as defined in this persuasive case for the small college by Howard Lowry, who has been president of Ohio’s College of Wooster for twenty-two years.
Shabos Nahamu
Isaac Babel, who died in a Soviet concentration camp in 1940, was perhaps the greatest Russian short-story writer since Chekhov. The following tale, here translated by Max Hayward, first appeared in a Moscow daily in 1918 and was republished in ZNAMYAin 1964. “Shabos nahamu” is the Hebrew “Sabbath of Comfort,” on which, after a period of lamentation for the Destruction of the Temple, the rabbi consoles the synagogue congregation by reading more cheerful passages from the Prophets.
Bonanza in Colorado Who Gets It?
An oil reserve worth as much as $300 billion lies under the earth in the West, and the fight for it is well underway in Washington between the oil companies and representatives of the public at large. A veteran member of the national news staff of the Washington POSTand author of books about the government, TAXPAYERS’ HAYRIDEand ARMS, MONEY AND POLITICS, Julius Duscha here tells how the struggle is going.
Dusk in Winter
Writers on the Campus
Each year writers are finding refuge on university campuses in ever increasing numbers. What the writers, and the universities, get out of these encounters is described by Donald Hall, a poet, critic, and editor who now teaches English at the University of Michigan.
Committee
John Singer Sargent in His Studio
The famous philosopher William James enjoyed painting in his spare time, and two of his sons, William, Jr., and Alexander, achieved more than local celebrity as portraitists.
The Rise and Fall of Elmer Zilch
Few American magazines have matched the rocketlike course of BALLYHOO,which in 1931 went from its beginning to a circulation of 2,000,000 and then vanished without trace from the American scene. Norman Anthony, its editor and creator, now lives in Garrison, New York, where he does free-lance writing, editorial consultation, and television work.
I Am, Yours &C. The Art of Writing Letters
Louis Kronenberger, ATLANTIC critic and essayist, here examines an art that is frequently pronounced dead, yet somehow manages to stay alive and to take on added fascination in the age of the telephone, the tape recorder, and the communications satellite.
