William Maxwell is perhaps the most significant and least studied of midcentury American literary editors. This conjunction of literary impact and scholarly neglect tells us something about the constitutional reserve…
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Issue 9: Editing American Literature, Peer Reviewed Articles
Issue 9: Editing American Literature, Peer Reviewed Articles
“It’s Only Vanity if It’s Not Good”: Daisy Aldan and Women Midcentury Small Press Publishers
“Well, if you’re a woman you put yourself somewhere near the beginning & then there’s this other place where you put yourself in terms of everybody” Alice Notley, Doctor Williams’ Heiresses…
Issue 9: Editing American Literature, Peer Reviewed Articles
The Chevalier and the Commahunter: Norman Holmes Pearson Edits Modernism
I would start out this essay with “Norman Holmes Pearson is best known as…,” but Norman Holmes Pearson isn’t particularly well-known as anything. For scholars of twentieth-century American literature, he surfaces…
Issue 9: Editing American Literature, Peer Reviewed Articles
Writer Conscious: Katharine S. White, Mary McCarthy, and Editing as Intimacy at The New Yorker
In a closely argued three-page letter in 1946, Mary McCarthy flatly rejected New Yorker editor Katharine S. White’s revisions to her latest submission. “I’m afraid that the new manuscript strikes a chill…
Issue 9: Editing American Literature, Peer Reviewed Articles
The Third Eye: Editorial Visions of the Draft Text
In a 1993 Paris Review interview, Toni Morrison identifies the value of editing: “Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work; for me that…
Issue 9: Editing American Literature, Peer Reviewed Articles
Introduction: Seeing Double: Editors in Postwar American Literature
When literary editors appear in fiction, they are often ambiguous and even duplicitous figures. The plot of Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) is set in motion in the top-floor office of a…
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
On Lipstick Lesbians, Feminine Suffering, and Aspirational Idiocy
When I was sixteen, I only wanted one thing: to be fucking sexy. I did not achieve this. It was 2013, and I was just a suburban teen, wearing a…
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
The American Bimbo as a Site of Spiritual Struggle
Two days after shaving my head down to the skin with the help of my roommate and a BIC razor, I fell asleep on our couch while watching cable TV….
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
Have We Learned Anything?
In late November 2006, I was knee-deep in my daughter’s toddlerhood, still getting used to the new body I’d found myself in. A little rounder in the middle, breasts still…
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
On Twinning: The Parent Trap, The Hiltons, and the White Girls Who Raised Me
Once, at ten, I cut a tuft of my hair with a pair of craft scissors. I had just re-watched The Parent Trap and was mesmerized still by that red-headed…