Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Miss Gordon's [early] stories rest on what were, at the time of their composition, relatively secure philosophical foundations, while her later works, including novels as well as short stories, are both structurally and texturally more complicated as a defense against those hostile armies which have appeared at the gates in ever-increasing numbers since the publication of The Forest of the South…. The philosophical assumptions to which I refer are ontological and define man's place in t...

[Miss Gordon] is a conscious heiress to what is probably the central tradition of modern fiction, which we can refer to, following some of its great practitioners, as the Impressionist novel…. Miss Gordon is more than the follower of a tradition; indeed, her innovations are bold and far-reaching. But she often works out her devices with an eye on the masters whom she honors. (pp. 279-80) Her method, if we may call it that, consists in subtly adjusting her prose medium to her subject. If she were a Re...

It will be my assumption that writers of Miss Gordon's vision have but one subject. On one level hers is in the fullest sense traditional and historic. By this I do not mean what is commonly understood as the "historic novel": that is, the costume piece or the arbitrary use of certain historic periods dramatized Caroline Gordon 1895–1981 © Hans Namuth 1983through crucial events. The costume piece can be dis...

It seems auspicious that two works representing the best of Caroline Gordon's art, The Collected Stories and a new edition of Aleck Maury, Sportsman, should be published so close together and so near the time of Gordon's death. These two books are the ones for which we will most likely remember her. Aleck Maury is clearly her masterwork, and The Collected Stories is, with a few exceptions, a collection of superb, often flawless short fiction. Any doubt that Gordon was a master craftsman is lai...

The twentieth century has been blessed with a number of excellent artists who have also been significant critics. The best of these have gone beyond the kind of activity which consists of mere apology or justification for their own work and have explored major questions of import to society as a whole in both their imaginative and discursive writings. Typical of this concern at its most intense among writers and critics of fiction is the work of Caroline Gordon, who has been emphatic in her insistence on th...

Caroline Gordon's angle of vision—the vantage point from which she regards the moving configurations of human existence—is primarily epic. As an intrinsic structure, that is, as one of the fundamental generic patterns, the epic is concerned with the ongoing of history. Within its broad expanse everything is sacrificed to an essentially eschatological thrust; for nothing less than the outcome of the human enterprise hangs upon the success of its heroic quest. Domestic life must be set as...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Despite the praise, the reputation, and the acknowledged importance of Miss Gordon's work, her fiction has not received the kind of critical attention one might have expected it to attract, particularly in an age so productive of literary criticism. To date, there has been only one thin pamphlet and a half-dozen or so articles about Caroline Gordon's eight novels and her two collections of short stories. One reason Miss Gordon's fiction has not attracted much critical attention is that ...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

[The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon] may be divided into the central and peripheral. The peripheral are relatively few, with two long examples, "The Captive" (the story of a white woman captured by Indians) and "Emmanuele! Emmanuele!" (laid in North Africa and France), and some several short pieces involving the Civil War. The central stories, more numerous, refer to the land [of southeast Kentucky] …, and in these the enclosing sense of the land combines with the en...

From the start one is aware in Gordon's fiction of a decisive, directing set of values. Indeed, her insistent conservatism seems to demand a personal response, and although it is hard to resist the narrative strength which compels sympathy with her protagonists, I confess to a deep unease at the nostalgia for past certainties which pervades each story. This traditionalism embraces both a Faulknerian yearning for a lost relationship with the land, and also a social vision, of a world where men led and...

[Caroline Gordon's] territory is the South—specifically Kentucky, in that time not so long ago when families still kept track of first cousins twice removed, and when the men spent their days hunting while the women, left behind, sat langorously on the gallery. The extraordinary vigor of her "Collected Stories" arises from the fact that Caroline Gordon's heart lies more with the hunters than with those women on the gallery. No scent of faded lavender drifts from these page...

Qualities that we associate with the southern mind dominate Miss Gordon as they do writers as various as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Robert Penn Warren. Like these distinguished contemporaries of hers, she has made creative use of the tragic dimensions of human life, the aborted aspirations of most human beings, the sense of evil infecting the good and true, the glories and the burdens of a legendary past, the sense of cultures and individuals in conflict, and a feeling for place that becomes a mute...

The mood of Caroline Gordon's short stories [in The Collected Stories] is just this side of elegiac. Here is not a lament for the dead, but rather an evocation of a world that is passing away, a celebration of things enjoyed in every particular precisely because they will not come again. It is not just the inevitability but the propriety of time's passage that Miss Gordon's narratives acknowledge. For her the changing world is cherished in its details, arrested for a moment in an image ...