Full Description
In the fall of 1959, Harper's Magazine published a special supplement on the state of writing and the American literary scene. The supplement was greeted with a broadside of commendation and a fusillade of cavil, and has since become recognized as the most useful brief survey of the contemporary state of the American writing arts and of their fellow travelers, the spoken word, the typescript word, the filmed and televised word, and the publishing memorandum.
In this newly reissued volume in the Rutgers University Press Classics Imprint, Writing in America proves to be as stimulating as it was in 1960. Here, writers including Robert Brustein, Stanley Kunitz, and C.P. Snow examine the state of writing in American novels, films, and television candidly and critically. The result is a collection of essays that showcase a first-rate and highly entertaining piece of reporting on the American literary scene that resonate in 2017.
Contents
Contents
The Wider and Wiser Use of Books
Mason Gross
The Alone Generation: A Comment on the Fiction of the Fifties
Alfred Kazin
Poetry's Silver Age: An Improbable Dialogue
Stanley Kunitz
Why American Plays Are Not Literature
Robert Brustein
The Decline of Book Reviewing
Elizabeth Hardwick
Who Needs No Introduction
Kingsley Amis
Which Side of the Atlantic?
C. P. Snow
On the Teaching of Writing
Archibald MacLeish
The Writer and Hollywood
Budd Schulberg
The Lost Art of Writing for Television
Vance Bourjaily
How and Why I Write the Costume Novel
Frank Yerby
Writers and Their Editors: Notes on an Uneasy Marriage
John Fischer
Letter to a Young Man About to Enter Publishing
Anonymous
Two View of the Reviews
About the Contributors
