Volume 20, Issue 3
FRONT COVER: Leonard Baskin
Sidney Kaplin
BRONZE BAS-RELIEF
Courtesy Kennedy Galleries, New York
This issue began as an act of homage to Professor Sidney Kaplan upon the occasion of his retirement last year after teaching English at the University of Massachusetts since 1947. To speak of his retiring is, of course, wrong: he is now busier them ever with his own research and continues to be an incorrigible pedagogue. Nevertheless, it is fit that the formal occasion be marked, especially by MR as it completes, this autumn, its twentieth year of publication. As the journal’s first co-editor, Sidney Kaplan did more to shape its crucial formative years than any other single person, and through the years he has continued to serve it with his marvelous eye, brain, and character.
Leonard Baskin’s memoir is eloquent testimony to that force and influence; the rest of the contents bear witness as well. The contributors–some, like Harry Levin and John Hope Franklin, friends and former teachers–were asked to participate because they were workers in those fields that have occupied Sidney Kaplan throughout his professional life: black literature, history, and art, American civilization, the interactions of society, life and the imagination generally. If we have succeeded in making this a living and rich issue we owe them our thanks, as well as John Bracey, Herbert Gutman, Paul Wright and others who helped gather the materials. John Hicks and Robert Tucker deserve special commendation for their expert and selfless editorial labors putting them together. That is the essential labor, of love, that we have all learned from Sidney Kaplan.
JULES CHAMETZKY
For the Editors
Table of Contents
A Note on the Issue, by Jules Chametzky
Revisiting Dos Passos’ USA, Non-Fiction by Harry Levin
Prayer on my 62nd Birthday, Poetry by Mary Doyle Curran
“Birth of a Nation”–Propaganda as History, Non-Fiction by John Hope Franklin
Life Story; Orientation, Poetry by J. Kates
Intellectuals & Society in Western Massachusetts:
The Pastorate of Jonathan Edwards, Non-Fiction by Patricia Tracy
Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Career, Non-Fiction by R.J. Wilson
A Response, Non-Fiction by Robert A Gross
The Dream of Lee, Poetry by Reynolds Price
They Say God Has His Hands in His Pockets, Poetry by Maureen Helleren
Nine Night Version, Fiction by Michael Thelwell
Callings, Poetry by Leonard Nathan
Dr. Johnson’s Friends: Civil Rights by Copyright, Non-Fiction by David Levering Lewis
Roses, Poetry by Jane Flanders
Wannsee, A Tragi-Comedy by Eric Bentley
The King’s Two Bodies: Lincoln, Nixon, & Presidential Self-Sacrifice, Non-Fiction by Michael Paul Rogin
Minstrelsy and Early Jazz, Non-Fiction by Berndt Ostendorf
Early Black Benevolent Societies 1780-1830, Non-Fiction by Robert L. Harris, Jr.
Sidney Kaplan: Memoir by Leonard Baskin
Contributors
Leonard Baskin‘s wash drawing of Heinrich von Kleist appears on the title page of the Eric Bentley play in this issue.
Eric Bentley‘s most recent book is Rallying Cries (New Republic Press which contains Are You Now and two other plays. Wannsee will soon appear in Eric Bentley Plays from Horizon Press.
Mary Doyle Curran teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Boston; her stories and poems have appeared frequently in MR; she is on the Pushcart Prize list of outstanding writers for 1978.
Jane Flanders is a Bryn Mawr graduate living in Washington, D.C. with her husband and three children; her first book of poems, Leaving and Coming Back, will soon be published by The Quarterly Review of Literature.
John Hope Franklin is Chairman of the Department of History at the University of Chicago.
Robert A. Gross teaches in History and American Studies at Amherst College.
Robert L. Harris, Jr., is a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow for 1979-80 and is on the Afro-American History staff at Cornell University, Ithaca.
Maureen Helleren is a graduate of Dickinson College and the University of Indiana. Her poems have appeared in the Coe Review and other publications, and she now lives and works in New York City.
J. Kates is Poetry Editor of The Nantucket Review.
Harry Levin is the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
David Levering Lewis is the author of King: A Biography, and has a volume, When Harlem Was in Vogue, forthcoming from Knopf in 1980.
Leonard Nathan has long been a valued contributor to MR. His latest books include Returning Your Call (Princeton), The Teachings of Grandfather Fox (Ithaca), and The Lost Distance (Chowder Chapbooks).
Berndt Ostendorf is author of Der Mythos in der Neuen Welt and Chairman of the Institut fur England und Amerikastudien at Frankfurt University.
Reynolds Price, distinguished southern novelist, poet, short story writer, holds the Faulkner Foundation Prize (1963) and many other honors.
Michael Paul Rogin is a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and he is currently at work on a study of politics and family in Herman Melville.
Michael Thelwell‘s story in this issue is from his forthcoming novel The Harder They Come; he teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Patricia Tracy is teaching American Colonial history at Williams College; she has a book on Jonathan Edwards scheduled for 1980 from Hill & Wang.
R. J. Wilson teaches history and philosophy at Smith College and published In Quest of Community: Social Philosophy in the United States with Oxford in 1969.