Synopses & Reviews
Review
"In the fall of 1935 young Robert Heilman, fresh out of Harvard, took up his post as instructor of English at Louisiana State University. Within a few weeks he had witnessed the assasination of Huey Long (Heilman and his wife happened to be touring the capitol on the fateful day) and the birth of the Southern Review, edited by his young colleagues Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. This odd initiation into the complexity of Southern life— brutality and high culture, side by side— may explain this Pennsylvanian's lifelong fascination with the region: a fascination witnessed eloquently by the essays gathered here. The Southern Connection begins as a quite engaging memoir of Heilman's tenure at LSU and broadens out at last into a shrewd meditation on modern Southern literature, most of whose principal actors eventually wandered through Baton Rouge and into the pages of its influential quarterly. Though Heilman long ago left the South for a distinguished career at the University of Washington, we can be grateful that he has elected to visit it again in this valuable and likable book." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
"In the fall of 1935 young Robert Heilman, fresh out of Harvard, took up his post as instructor of English at Louisiana State
University. Within a few weeks he had witnessed the assassination of Huey Long (Heilman and his wife happened to be touring the capitol on the fateful day) and the birth of the Southern Review, edited by his young colleagues Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. This odd initiation into the complexity of Southern life— brutality and high culture, side by side— may explain this Pennsylvanian's lifelong fascination with the region: a fascination witnessed eloquently by the essays gathered here. The Southern Connection begins as a quite engaging memoir of Heilman's tenure at LSU and broadens out at last into a shrewd meditation on modern Southern literature, most of whose principal actors eventually wandered through Baton Rouge and into the pages of its influential quarterly. Though Heilman long ago left the South for a distinguished career at the University of Washington, we can be grateful that he has elected to visit it again in this valuable and likable book." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Description
"Bibliography: writings on Southern subjects by Robert Bechtold Heilman": p. 269-271.