May 1977
In This Issue
Explore the May 1977 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
Obscenity—Forget It
An attorney who helped to win landmark decisions against censorship in the 1960s presents some tough but fair-minded means of dealing with the flood of printed and filmed material that abuses the young and assaults our privacy.
Reports and Comment: Cuba
Castro faces his country's difficulties
A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton
First Flowering: The Best of the Harvard Advocate
The Fan
Duke
The Sword of Shannara
Runestruck
The Splendour of Islamic Calligraphy
The Life and Times of Chaucer
Preminger: An Autobiography
Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid
Voyage to Greenland
O America
Prize Stories of 1977
Fools Say
The Early Morning Milk Train
Spain
Party of One: The No-Fault Society
The Editor's Page
A Conversation With John Gardner
“Art makes no laws, only very difficult complicated suggestions,” says John Gardner, author of the recent October Light and five earlier novels. Born in 1933, Gardner grew up on a farm near Batavia, New York, and was educated at Washington University in St. Louis and at the State University of Iowa. He is married and the father of two children. A teacher and a scholar specializing in medieval literature, he has been teaching at both Skidmore and Bennington colleges this year. He was interviewed during a visit to Lexington, Kentucky, for the premier of Rumpelstiltskin, an opera for which he wrote the libretto.
Redemption
Cuba
A Certain Providence
Judge Jenk
The Calling
My Story
Arrowhead
This Reaping
Gangster Dreams
Twilight in White Rhodesia
“Everything you see in this country the white man built,” says one of the 270,000 whites who live among 6.5 million blacks, “. . . and I’m not going to let any blighter take it.” But the country young Cecil Rhodes began settling fewer than 90 years ago has become a land in limbo. White Rhodesians are ostracized by international society, harassed by guerrillas, and caught in what seems to many to be inexorable pressure to surrender that bountiful country to the black majority.
Pencils Down
In which the hero is tested.
The Briefcase
The Parthenon Is Shrinking
The view from the Acropolis today is clouded with industrial pollution, and the poisonous air is eating away at some of the world’s most impressive buildings.
Building Her
Yumbo
Culture Watch
One Last Fling at Coobies Bay
A Place to Come To
The Age of Uncertainty
