Archive for October, 2007


Happy weekend from the Delta research dept., now with Eudora Welty references

As far as I can tell, some twenty-odd years after the events of Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and about eight years before the novel appeared, my great-grandfather was hired to manage the plantation Welty fictionalized in it. The book is set in September 1923, at Shellmound, just north of Greenwood, Mississippi. Very little happens in Delta Wedding, and apparently that was intentional. . . .

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Eric Weinberger on Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons

Mark Sarvas’ praise for the depiction of fathers and sons in Sándor Márai’s novel The Rebels led me back to Kafka’s Letter to Father (a gift a friend brought me from Prague several years ago). It’s an illuminating document — complex, sad, highly self-serving — but not a work of art. Writing about the feelings a father inspires is difficult. . . .

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