Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In 1925, Edwin A. Alderman, president of the University ofVirginia, fulfilled a long-held dream by establishing a magazine at the institutionfounded by Thomas Jefferson just over one hundred years earlier. Not only didAlderman initiate publication of the Virginia QuarterlyReview, he contributed an essay to its inauguralissue.
Appearing as the first selection in thisnew volume of nonfiction from the VQR, Alderman's Edgar Allan Poe and theUniversity of Virginia reflects the rare combination of literary sensibility andimmersion in the political and social issues of the day, which has characterized thejournal throughout its seventy-five-year history. As Alderman writes, I may befrank and say that there was a time when Poe did not greatly appeal to me. I feltthe sheer, clear beauty of his song..., but his detachment from the world of men, where my interests most centered, left me unresponsive and simply curious.... I havecome, however, to see the limitations of that view, and to behold somethingadmirable and strange and wonderful in this proud, giftedman.
While the style and diction of thecontributions have changed in the years since that first spring issue, a similarclarity of thought, deep intelligence, candor, and command of language can be foundin every one of the fifty one essays assembled here by Alexander Burnham. From itshome at One West Range, a few doors down from Poe's own room, the VQR has welcomedto its pages scholars such as Dumas Malone and Robert Coles, and writers whose bookshave become international bestsellers, including Arthur C. Clarke and FrancesMayes.
Included here are some of the twentiethcentury's most brilliant thinkers and stylists, such international literary, political, and intellectual figures as Andre Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, T. S. Eliot, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, and Robert Graves. George F. Kennan muses on The Experience ofWriting History, Henry Steele Commager asks Do We Have a Class Society?, andEdmund S. Morgan considers the aloof character of George Washington. Carlos Bakertracks Ezra Pound through Venice, and Scott Donaldson ponders The Jilting of ErnestHemingway. These leading lights share space, as they do in every volume of thejournal, with lesser-known but no less talented writers ruminating on the Battle ofthe Bulge, the Berlin Wall, the Bomb, and Vietnam, on growing up in Hollywood andliving in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Writers ofthe South are fittingly represented by Thomas Wolfe, Mary Lee Settle, and Louis D.Rubin Jr., but a quick scan of the table of contents reveals that the VQR has neverbeen a regional magazine. As the current editor, Staige D. Blackford writes in hispreface, Since its inception, the Virginia QuarterlyReview has tried to offer its readers a variety of essays on avariety of topics ranging from foreign affairs to domestic politics, from literatureto travel, from sports to sex, from music tomedicine.
On the occasion of its seventy-fifthanniversary, We Write for Our Own Time amply andentertainingly reflects what the VQR's mastheadhas always proclaimed as its identity: A National Journal of Literature andDiscussion.