Contents
“I needed both. . .”
CRITICAL
The Days Before
Reflections on Willa Cather
A Note on The Troll Garden
Gertrude Stein: Three Views
“Everybody Is a Real One”
Second Wind
The Wooden Umbrella
“It Is Hard to Stand in the Middle”
Eudora Welty and A Curtain of Green
The Wingèd Skull
On a Criticism of Thomas Hardy
E. M. Forster
Virginia Woolf
D. H. Lawrence
Quetzalcoatl
A Wreath for the Gamekeeper
“The Laughing Heat of the Sun”
The Art of Katherine Mansfield
The Hundredth Role
Dylan Thomas
“A death of days. . .”
“A fever chart. . .”
“In the morning of the poet. . .”
A Most Lively Genius
Orpheus in Purgatory
In Memoriam
Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939)
James Joyce (1882–1941)
Sylvia Beach (1887–1962)
Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
PERSONAL AND PARTICULAR
On Writing
My First Speech
“I must write from memory. . .”
No Plot, My Dear, No Story
“Writing cannot be taught. . .”
The Situation of the Writer
The Situation in American Writing
Transplanted Writers
The International Exchange of Writers
The Author on Her Work
No Masters or Teachers
On “Flowering Judas”
“The only reality. . .”
“Noon Wine”: The Sources
Notes on the Texas I Remember
Portrait: Old South
A Christmas Story
Audubon’s Happy Land
The Flower of Flowers
A Note on Pierre-Joseph Redouté
A House of My Own
The Necessary Enemy
“Marriage Is Belonging”
A Defense of Circe
St. Augustine and the Bullfight
Act of Faith: 4 July 1942
The Future Is Now
The Never-Ending Wrong
Afterword
MEXICAN
Why I Write About Mexico
Reports from Mexico City,
The New Man and the New Order
The Fiesta of Guadalupe
The Funeral of General Benjamín Hill
Children of Xochitl
The Mexican Trinity
Where Presidents Have No Friends
In a Mexican Patio
Leaving the Petate
The Charmed Life
Corridos
Sor Juana: A Portrait of the Poet
Notes on the Life and Death of a Hero
A Mexican Chronicle, 1920–1943
Blasco Ibanez on “Mexico in Revolution”
Paternalism and the Mexican Problem
La Conquistadora
¡Ay, Que Chamaco!
Old Gods and New Messiahs
Diego Rivera
These Pictures Must Be Seen
Rivera’s Personal Revolution
Parvenu. . .
History on the Wing
Thirty Long Years of Revolution
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
About the Author
The Land That Is Nowhere