The Writer in Our World: A Triquarterly Symposium

by Reginald Gibbons (Editor)

Book by

296 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1986

About the author

Reginald Gibbons is an American poet, fiction writer, translator, and literary critic. He is the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities, Emeritus, at Northwestern University. Gibbons has published numerous books, including 11 volumes of poems, translations of poetry from ancient Greek, Spanish, and co-translations from Russian. He has published short stories, essays, reviews and art in journals and magazines, has held Guggenheim Foundation and NEA fellowships in poetry and a research fellowship from the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. For his novel, Sweetbitter, he won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; for his book of poems, Maybe It Was So, he won the Carl Sandburg Prize. He has won the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, and other honors, among them the inclusion of his work in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His book Creatures of a Day was a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Award for poetry. His other poetry books include Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (Balcones Prize), Last Lake and Renditions, his eleventh book of poems. Two books of poems are forthcoming: Three Poems in 2024 and Young Woman With a Cane in 2025. He has also published two collections of very short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches and An Orchard in the Street.

Reviews

[Ralph · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book sat for a long time on my to-read shelves before I got around to it. While I was able to mine some nuggets of information from it about writing, the writer's life and the role of the writer in society, it eventually became a hate-rally against Western society and literature, a condemnation of "white colonialism" and the writers who lived during that time. I think those participating in this symposium applied their prejudice, hatred and bigotry against literature more than a century old and judged the writers guilty of the ills they perceived in present society. Though less than forty years have elapsed since this book was compiled, it, too, suffers time poorly. What seemed justified then, as society was undergoing socialist radicalization, comes across now as a hateful, an almost-mindless ideologically driven rant against an idea that had run its course by the end of the Great War, but which cannot be turned loose because there would then be no Great White Evil against which to rage. In reality, the book is less a tome about writing and writers, than a time capsule from an era when ethnic hatred was yet in its infancy and still far from the power it holds today.