William Goyen

A longtime friend of William Goyen's, editor Robert Phillips is Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of English at the University of Houston. He also edited Letters of Delmore Schwartz and Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin: Selected Letters.

"Goyen's work requires much of a reader, but these letters provide an intimate 'portrait of the artist' from Texas that makes reading it and them well worth the effort." Texas Books in Review "Letters this impassioned about one's art have few if any analogues or forebears. They take their place in the tradition of Baudelaire, Flaubert and even Dostoyevsky... His prose has the emotional power of poetry...and these letters deal unceasingly with the torment of getting his vision into the right language... Goyen's letters are almost never preoccupied with philosophical grandstanding but with the daily details, the constant affirmation of a tough choice -- the 'agony and ecstasy' of creating some of America's most distinctive prose." San Antonio Express-News "...an exceptionally responsible volume, one that belongs--for the eloquence of its...accounts of the writer's life, intention, and travail--with other important American documents of the period--the journals of Wilder and Wescott, the letters of Cheever and Bogan..." Richard Howard

• IntroductionNotes on the TextAcknowledgmentsChronologyOne. Houston, Canal Zone, Oakland, Medford, Taos, Los Angeles, Berkeley, 1937–1947Two. Napa, Dallas, Portland, 1947–1949Three. London, New York, Dallas, Chicago, Saratoga Springs, Houston, 1949–1951Four. New York, Shelter Island, East Hampton, Taos, Rome, Naples, ZÜrich, 1952–1954Five. Taos, New York, 1954–1957Six. Bucks County, New York, Boston, West Germany, New York, Weston, Los Angeles, 1957–1978Seven. Los Angeles, New York, Los Angeles, 1978–1983Afterword by Stephen SpenderIndex of RecipientsGeneral Index