Patrick Samway's book will appeal to a variety of readers for a variety of reasons. Readers interested in Flannery O'Connor (1925–64) will welcome it for the insights it provides into O'Connor's life, work, relationships, and personality. Readers interested in the theological aspects of O'Connor's writings also will find much of interest here. Persons intrigued by the details of American publishing, the tasks and techniques of editing, and the nature of publishing in the US in the post-war period will likewise welcome Samway's book, especially since it deals with the friendship between O'Connor (one of America's most distinguished writers) and Robert Giroux ([1914–2008] one of the nation's most important editors). Drawing on scores if not hundreds of previously unpublished letters and many other kinds of original archival research, and writing as a longtime friend of Giroux, Samway offers evidence and perspectives unavailable elsewhere. For all these reasons, his book is a welcome addition to the ever-growing body of scholarship on O'Connor. It functions, in some ways, as a dual biography of one of America's most important authors and of one key figure who helped her achieve national and international prominence.Many readers, of course, will probably hope this book contains more of the sort of splendid letters by O'Connor that make The Habit of Being (1979), a massive collection of her correspondence, such a pleasure to read. That volume, edited by her longtime friend Sally Fitzgerald, is one of the most interesting books by or about O'Connor. The letters it reprints are often rich, provocative, insightful, compelling, very funny, and very moving. Fewer such letters appear in Samway's book, unfortunately. Instead, much of the correspondence between O'Connor and Giroux necessarily dealt with the nitty-gritty details of bringing books into print: contracts, contract revisions, contractual clauses, specifics of payments, and so on. This sort of thing, although important, often makes for dry reading. One appreciates the work Samway has done, but one often wishes that he had had more with which to work.Nevertheless, patient readers will find much of interest here, especially in the letters from O'Connor to Giroux and the other correspondents Samway discusses. Because much of the book's first third amounts to a biography focused on O'Connor's early life, little there will strike O'Connor scholars as especially new. However, when Samway gets into the 1950s and begins quoting from previously unpublished letters, things get both interesting and memorable. At one point, O'Connor discusses with Giroux planned changes in the details she either did include, did not include, or will include in Wise Blood, her first novel (1952). “Probably the mummy,” she says, “needs to be disposed of. I hadn't thought about it but I will. As for Haze's past in the army,” she continues, “I was afraid to fool with that: I don't know what goes on there” (107). Here are the familiar O'Connor attitude and tone: practical, straightforward, open to suggestions, and willing to change when change seems warranted. Later we hear some of the humor we expect from her: “I was surprised,” she writes about a paperback printing of Wise Blood, that the pocket edition should be out so soon and that the cover was no worse than it was. I had expected Mrs. Watts to be on it and was hoping the new Georgia Literature Commission would take it off the drugstore racks. We have a fine new literature commission in this state, composed of a preacher, a picture-show manager, and some other worthy who I keep thinking must or should be the warden at the state penitentiary. (131) A few lines later she tells Giroux that her newest novel's theme “requires prayer and fasting to make it get anywhere. I manage to pray but am a very sloppy faster” (131). Passages such as these are worth the price of admission, even if they tend to be few and far between.Roughly twenty pages later, she writes to another editor about a planned telecast of a compilation of some of her stories: If you could tell me what time this program is going to be and on what channel I would be obliged, as my mother insists upon notifying her connections and I have no information to pacify her with. People here feel that since I am going to be on a television program I must be a better writer than they thought. Competing now with the Lone Ranger. (154) This is the O'Connor so many know and love. Later, commenting on some photographs her publisher was considering for a book cover, she writes: “Thank you from my mother for the pictures. For myself I think they're horrible but she is overjoyed. I am glad you are not going to use either of those. They are not suitable for anyone but a parent” (166). A few lines later, reporting that she has been asked to discuss “The Significance of the Short Story (UGH),” she says she is thinking of telling her audience “that this is no concern of the short story writer” (166). On the facing page, she reports that her mother is planning to send copies of A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955) “to sick friends” (167). Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Flannery and her mom: three of the most memorable pairs of postwar comedians.Told (confidentially) by Giroux that her latest editor did not like her books, O'Connor responds as only O'Connor could: “[T]hat doesn't bother me. I guess they are disliked by some of the best people” (173). Later, commenting on the difficulties of being an effective writer, she confides, “I know nothing harder than making good people believable” (176). At the end of this letter, she observes that publishers apparently employ “any translator who cares to call himself one” (176). On the following page, she describes Dorothy Day's reaction upon learning that Caroline Gordon planned to dedicate a book to her: “‘I wish Caroline had dedicated the book to “My Dog Spot,” or anybody’” (177). Gems like these do not appear often in Samway's book, but they do appear. Sometimes, as in other collections of letters by O'Connor, the gems concern life on the farm: “You came a day too soon as far as the excitement was concerned as on Wednesday, Mr. Parker discovered a rattlesnake near the chicken yard; but all he did was throw a crate on top of it and run, so it is still at large and maybe we can produce it the next time you come” (181).Later she reports that a “man I know in Austin sends me a paper called The Lone Star Catholic and I have a mental picture of what a lone star Catholic should look like” (187). Comments like these recall O'Connor's wry wit and taste for the absurd, but another letter shows her being tough and uncompromising in rejecting a plea from a publishing company that she had decided to leave (187–88). Sometimes she expresses rare satisfaction with her work (“I am about convinced now that my novel is finished. It has reached the stage where it is a pleasure for me to type so I presume it is done” [198]). Sometimes, and more typically, she can be harshly self- critical: the same book just mentioned (her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away [1960]) “entirely fails to move me, except to disgust” (203). Sometimes she can be very funny when discussing a new book (she says a paperback publisher's “Gory Jacket Division will have a field day with” The Violent Bear It Away) yet offer intriguing insights into the book's intended theme and meanings within the same letter (206). In a long letter that Samway helpfully quotes at length, O'Connor explains precisely why she considered her second novel a “mystery” story rather than a “salvation” narrative (211–12). These sorts of comments are especially likely to interest serious students of her fiction rather than simple admirers of her personality and prose. And the insights to be gleaned from Samway's book often continue into the frequently lengthy notes, as when he quotes from an unpublished letter in which O'Connor confesses, “I seldom read novels through, especially when they are that long, but I read all of” a recent novel by Madison Jones, whom she genuinely admired (273). (This passage should probably have been included in the main text of the book.) Later, Samway valuably quotes, in the notes, from a long list of corrections O'Connor made in the text of The Violent Bear It Away (276).If part of the main interest of Samway's volume comes from comments made by O'Connor, another part comes from others' comments and information about her. Thus we learn that the ACTH she took to combat lupus made her nervous and kept her awake (108); that Allen Tate called “Good Country People” (1955) “without exception the most terrible and powerful story about Maimed Souls I have ever read” (136); and, in particular, that it was Giroux who suggested the splendid ending of that story, a suggestion O'Connor wisely followed (137–38). We learn also that O'Connor's mother asked Giroux to persuade O'Connor “to write about nice people” (195; emphasis in original). Furthermore, besides the information the book provides about O'Connor, there is a good deal about Giroux, New York publishing, the national literary scene, and the state of American Catholicism and culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Apparently Giroux left Harcourt, Brace because of anti-Catholic prejudice; apparently he had to be careful, when visiting the O'Connors, not to bring his longtime male companion (who was also his lifelong closest friend); and so on. One comes away from this book incredibly impressed by Giroux's workload, his professionalism, his integrity, and his fundamental decency. One also comes away with a strong sense of the ins and outs of American publishing in the decades following the war.Given the fact that Samway has done so much original research and included excerpts from so many previously unpublished letters, many readers will wish that the book's publisher had used footnotes or parenthetical documentation rather than endnotes in this volume. It is, at best, an inconvenience to flip to the back of the book repeatedly to see which letters are new to this book and which sources are not. But this is a small complaint. Otherwise, the book is handsomely produced, and its contents will make it a crucial resource for students of O'Connor's life, career, and writings.

Ben Jonson's play The Sad Shepherd, published in 1641, has never become part of the canon for one obvious reason in particular: it is incomplete. Very little attention has been paid to the play by scholars. Paradoxically, an entire book, by Tom Hayes, has been written about this incomplete play: The Birth of Popular Culture: Ben Jonson, Maid Marian and Robin Hood (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1992). This book is not, perhaps, the sort of text likely to promote canonization of the play. The book's arguments are open to challenge on many, many points, as are the book's methods and style. A case for some kind of canonization of the play would probably need to rely on close reading of the text―close reading of the sort offered neither by Hayes nor by almost anyone. The play is symptomatic of other neglected works that have been read mainly for their "meanings" rather than for their artistic and literary craftsmanship. Canonization of Robin Hood literature, as of other neglected literature, is unlikely until students and other intelligent non-academics can be convinced that such literature is well-written and worth reading as literature (i.e., as language valued as language).

Contents: Preface by the General Editors Introductory Notes Poetry on Religion by Anne Wentworth, Elizabeth Rone, Mary Wells and Elizabeth Tipper Poetry on Politics by Rachel Jevon, Mrs A. M, Young Lady Poetry on Society by Mrs A. K. and Lady of Honour Poetry on Domestic/Social Affairs by Elizabeth With, Young Lady and Mary Evelyn Poetry on Mourning by Miss Pretty (Elizabeth Collett), Young Lady of Quality, Young Lady and Gentlewoman of Quality, Appendix, Anne Wentworth's 'England's Spiritual Pill'.

This essay examines the 1995 filmed version of Shakespeare's Othello, directed by Oliver Parker and starring Laurence Fishburne. For the first time in a big-budget movie, Othello was played by a black man – an astonishing fact when one considers that this development did not occur until almost the very end of the twentieth century. This essay briefly surveys the often highly divergent responses the film received. It concludes by defending various aspects of the film, including its tightly knit structure and also the performance by Irène Jacob as Desdemona. Because Jacob's presence in the film was often severely criticized, it seems worthwhile, in attempting to defend the film in general, to examine several scenes prominently featuring her contributions to the production.

This chapter traces nearly every reference to women—real or imagined, literal or symbolic—that appears in Ben Jonson’s important collection of poems titled Underwood. It discusses in particular his references to the muses and other figures of classical myth, and it also discusses the ways in which his references to ‘real’ women often add to the vividness and effectiveness of the collection. Often, however, ‘real’ women and ‘real’ events are also treated in highly symbolic ways. The chapter ends by considering the larger issue of ‘gender’ in Underwood, including the possibility of homoerotic overtones.