Richard S. Kennedy – författare

One of the most enduring characters in Thomas Wolfe's fiction is Francis Starwick, the Midwestern aesthete who befriends Eugene Grant at Harvard in Wolfe's second autobiographical novel, Of Time and the River. Wolfe created Starwick in order to provide a foil for the artistic development of Eugene: Starwick was the pretentious, narrow-minded dilettante whose response to the arts is all talk and pose, as compared with Eugene, who hopes to express in writing his intensity of feeling about all aspects of life.While writing the novel, however, Wolfe found his manuscript proliferating beyond his control, and he turned to his editor at Scribner's Maxwell Perkins, for help in shaping the final version of the book. In the process of organizing the massive manuscript for publication, Perkins deleted some of the analyses of Starwick's behavior and several of the episodes involving Eugene and Starwick. The result was that the relationship between the two young men was not as fully developed as Wolfe had originally planned.Richard S. Kennedy discovered these excised passages among the Wolfe papers at Harvard University's Houghton Library. In The Starwick Episodes has arranged them sequentially and indicated their position in the original manuscript. In one of them Starwick introduces Eugene to Joyce's Ulysses, and in another he takes him to view the paintings in Boston' Museum of Fine Arts. Additional scenes find the two exploring the lower depths of Paris until at length their true sexual natures are revealed in a visit to a Parisian brothel.Kennedy's research also uncovered the story of the life of Kenneth Raisbeck, the young man whom Wolfe used as the starting point for his fictional creation of Starwick. In his Introduction, Kennedy describes Raisbeck's career, both its brilliant promise and its tragic end, and his similarity to the character in the novel.The presence of Starwick in Of Time and the River is unforgettable despite the omission of some important scenes that Wolfe wrote for him. With the publication now of the deleted episodes, readers may gain an enriched sense of Wolfe's fascinating creation and a fuller understanding of what he was trying to convey.

This is an altogether engaging collection of ruminations on early New Orleans writers - George Washington Cable, Grace King, Lafcadio Hearn, and Kate Chopin - as well as three prolific twentieth-century authors who called the Crescent City ""home"" at various times: William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Walker Percy. In the book's final essay, Lewis P. Simpson reflects on the history of New Orleans as a literary center, giving special emphasis to Percy's The Moviegoer and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.

In 1920 Thomas Wolfe left the South with the strong desire to become a dramatist. To pursue his chosen craft, he enrolled in the Harvard 47 Workshop, at that time the most renowned in the nation. At first he wrote plays about Appalachian society and the Civil War. But it was not until Wolfe turned to the modern South, inspired by a disturbing return to his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, that his genius awoke. There he found the material he would work into the best of his three full-length plays written at Harvard, the material that in the next decade would be recast into the novels that would make him famous. This is the first book publication of Welcome to Our City, Thomas Wolfe's play in ten scenes of a modern South ruled by liars and real estate agents, overrun with boosterism, and dedicated to greed. This sprawling, fiery work has lain dormant among Wolfe's papers for over fifty years, abandoned by its author after an unsuccessful attempt to revise and shorten it for a New York Theatre Guild production. For this edition, Richard S. Kennedy has reassembled a full performance text of the workshop version presented at Harvard in 1923, a production that involved forty-five cast members, including over thirty speaking parts, required seven stage changes, and lasted over three and a half hours in performance.The action of Welcome to Our City centers on a scheme of the town fathers and real estate promoters of Altamont, a small southern city, to snatch up all the property in a centrally located black district, evict the tenants, tear down their houses and shops, and build a new white residential section in its place. When the blacks, under the angry leadership of a strong-willed doctor, resist eviction, a race riot breaks out, shattering both the precarious social balance of the city and the ""progressive"" dreams of Altamont's boosters. Building on this plot, Wolfe guides his audience through the back rooms, stately homes, ans shanty towns of Altamont, contrasting tradition-bound southern characters with a new breed of life drawn from the vast menagerie of 1920s Main Street America: fact-spouting yes-men, hypocritical religious leaders, anti-intellectual professors, provincial country club matrons, and politicians inauthentic from their heads to their feet.Welcome to Our City is not merely an exhibit in the artistic development of a future novelist. Wolfe used the dramatic form inventively and with considerable inspiration to expose the culture of greed that he saw spreading around him and to caricature the men who, he feared, would usher in an age of mediocrity across America. Emotionally gripping and mockingly satiric, Welcome to Our City captures the festering social climate of the 1920s in a vision of life that is uncomfortably relevant to our own times.

Letters--mostly of the nuts-and-bolts, practical variety--between Thomas Wolfe and his literary agent, Elizabeth Nowell. Nowell served as Wolfe's editor for many of his short stories, paring them down to make them acceptable to magazines. Oddly enough, his attitude toward her was grateful rather than adversarial, and their deep mutual respect is clearly evident in these letters.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The one hundred and fifty-six poems here, arranged in twelve sections and introduced by E. E. Cummings's biographer, Richard S. Kennedy, include his most popular poems, spanning his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up to his last valedictory sonnets. Also featured are thirteen drawings, oils, and watercolors by Cummings, most of them never before published.

Along with Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, Edward Estlin Cummings is one of the leading American poets who revolutionized literary expression in the twentieth century. He was also a Cubist painter, a champion of the little man, a brilliant conversationalist, a romantic idealist, a famous irrational curmudgeon, and husband to three of the most beautiful women of his time. This critical biography merges these various selves into one fascinating life story, many chapters of which could be mistaken for a great romantic novel. In following Cummings's development as a poet, it also includes a large number of previously unpublished poems and drawings.