An engaging, if unchallenging, account of an author whose route into—and out of—literary celebrity makes him seem, for better and worse, a man of his time. From the first short stories Caldwell (190387) struggled to get into print, his works drew on the observations he made of poverty in the rural South and the lessons in social consciousness he received from his father, a preacher. Caldwell's first wife, Helen, and their children shared his life of grinding poverty while enduring his volatile temperament. He honed his craft, helped by Helen's editing, but even his best-known work, Tobacco Road, generated poor initial sales—in Miller's estimation because the publisher, Scribner's, marketed the sexually explicit book so timidly. When playwright Jack Kirkland turned Tobacco Road into ``the bawdiest Broadway hit in history,'' Caldwell gained a solid income and practice at arguing for artistic freedom as local officials across the nation tried to close down touring-company productions. As he adapted to a more luxurious life, he also found himself a more glamorous wife: photographer Margaret Bourke-White, with whom he collaborated on studies of southern sharecropping and of Russia during the German invasion—an arrangement that collapsed as Caldwell learned he came second to her art just as Helen and the children had come second to his. Miller (who has a Ph.D. in History of American Civilization from Harvard) tends to avoid probing such fissures in his subject's actions and writings, particularly during Caldwell's decline from celebrity, finally giving this account the feel of a life observed with only intermittent intensity. For example, when discussing Caldwell's mid-1950s output—stories for ``mediocre (often X-rated) journals'' and a ``melodramatic, mildly pornographic'' novel whose sales were enhanced by its spicy cover—he concludes without a trace of irony that Caldwell was ``earning a living from his craft.'' Miller reveals, but never really explores, the complexities and inconsistencies of a man who wrote both first-rate fiction and disposable prose.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42931-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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