BiblioVault - Books about Rubin, Louis D.

Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate

Collected Letters, 1933-1976

Edited by Alphonse Vinh & Intro by Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

University of Missouri Press, 1998

Offering all of the extant letters exchanged by two of the twentieth century's most distinguished literary figures, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate: Collected Letters, 1933-1976 vividly depicts the remarkable relationship, both professional and personal, between Brooks and Tate over the course of their lifelong friendship.

An accomplished poet, critic, biographer, and teacher, Allen Tate had a powerful influence on the literary world of his era. Editor of the Fugitive and the Sewanee Review, Tate greatly affected the lives and careers of his fellow literati, including Cleanth Brooks. Esteemed coeditor of An Approach to Literature and Understanding Poetry, Brooks was one of the principal creators of the New Criticism. His Modern Poetry and the Tradition and The Well Wrought Urn, as well as his two-volume study of Faulkner, remain among the classics read by any serious student of literature. The correspondence between these two gentlemen-scholars, which began in the 1930s, extended over five decades and covered a vast amount of twentieth-century literary history.

In the more than 250 letters collected here, the reader will encounter their shared concerns for and responses to the work of their numerous friends and many prominent writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Robert Lowell. Their letters offer details about their own developing careers and also provide striking insight into the group dynamics of the Agrarians, the noteworthy community of southern writers who played so influential a role in the literature of modernism.

Brooks once said that Tate treated him like a younger brother, and despite great differences between their personalities and characters, these two figures each felt deep brotherly affection for the other. Whether they contain warm invitations for the one to visit the other, genteel or honest commentaries on their families and friends, or descriptions of the vast array of social, professional, and even political activities each experienced, the letters of Brooks and Tate clearly reveal the personalities of both men and the powerful ties of their strong camaraderie.

Invaluable to both students and teachers of literature, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate provides a substantial contribution to the study of twentieth-century American, and particularly southern, literary history.

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The Summer the Archduke Died

On Wars and Warriors

Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

University of Missouri Press, 2008

When World War II erupted, fifteen-year-old Louis Rubin pedaled his bike down to the Charleston harbor to see whether a German freighter might have come there to escape British warships, as had occurred in 1914. Although he went home disappointed, young Louis never lost his fascination with matters military.

Now one of America’s most esteemed literary scholars, Rubin again turns his thoughts to history—particularly military history—by sharing his lifelong interest in the First World War and its aftermath. The Summer the Archduke Died offers essays, beginning with the outbreak of the Great War in Europe in 1914 and covering events of subsequent years, that examine historical issues in a fresh way. These essays take in a panoramic view of German militarism, the American role in the war, and British and American politics and politicos. They convey the impact of the war on writers and include a critical review of Theodore Roosevelt’s life and legacy.

Rubin brings a keen eye for controversy to such matters as the battle of Jutland and Churchill’s stance on the war with Hitler. In a provocative essay on the New British Revisionism, he not only debunks recent criticism of Churchill but also examines the decline of the British class system. In “Ladies of the British Establishment,” he contrasts the politically notorious Mitford sisters with Violet Bonham Carter, who used her social position to advance the status of women in public life.

Ranging from the outbreak of the Great War to “A Certain Day in 1939” when European peace was shattered once more, Rubin’s lively pieces are rendered with the literary craftsmanship for which he is renowned. As informative as it is entertaining, The Summer the Archduke Died will appeal to aficionados of history and fine writing alike.

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Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog

On Writers and Writing

Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

University of Missouri Press, 2005

In Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog, award-winning author Louis D. Rubin, Jr., discusses writing and writers based on his own experience as a writer, editor, teacher, and publisher. Only ten years old when he wrote his first article for publication and eighty-one when he completed the preface to this book, Rubin skillfully incorporates more than seventy years of knowledge and experience into this comprehensive and highly readable work.

The title essay, which involves a railroad crossing in Mississippi, a painting, a novel by Eudora Welty, and a comment on language and image by Walker Percy, is an effort by Rubin to come to grips with a problem that has plagued him for years: what is “Southern” about Southern literature, and how does that Southernness figure in the literary imagination of its practitioners? Most of his essays deal with various problems and possibilities characterizing the American literary scene today: the literary uses of memory, writer’s block, the nature of place in fiction, the teaching of writers and the presence of writers on campuses, the condition of poetry today, sports writing, authorial intent in fiction, how nonfiction bolsters fiction, the parlous state of literary publishing, and other matters of cultural importance.

Among the authors whose works figure in the book are Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Thomas Wolfe, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Flannery O’Connor, Stendhal, Mark Twain, Henry James, A. J. Liebling, Shelby Foote, William Wordsworth, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway. The book concludes with a look at today’s literary situation, a diagnosis of how it got where it is, and some recommendations for rescuing it, inspired in part by the author’s failed attempt to buck the trend by founding Algonquin Books. Scholars and students of American literature, especially Southern literature, are sure to find much of value in these informative and inspirational essays from a dedicated and distinguished student of Southern letters.

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