Literary Executor Research Articles

Writing about Masud Khan

This article tells the story of a three-decade delay in the publication of Masud Khan’s personal diary, which he called his Work Books. They were meant for publication after his death in 1989, yet he neglected to name a literary executor prior to his death, and the copyright was subsequently allocated to the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). The IPA chose to destroy their copy of the Work Books in 2019, alongside all other Khan-related materials in their possession, yet Linda Hopkins, author of an acclaimed biography of Khan, worked alongside Steven Kuchuck to obtain permission from the IPA Executive Committee to publish an edited version of an exact copy of the Work Books which Khan had given to his close friends Robert and Sybil Stoller for eventual publication. This is the story of a struggle to get permissions, after objections were raised by various psychoanalysts who mistakenly feared the contents of the Work Books would invade the privacy rights of Khan’s patients.

Abraham Cowley against Bacon's "Idols of the Mind"

ABSTRACT: This essay examines the contributions of Abraham Cowley's poetry to the development of Royal Society scientific methods in the seventeenth century, particularly through Cowley's clarification of the forms of cognitive bias that Francis Bacon called "idols of the mind." We should understand many of Cowley's poetic choices and stylistic recommendations as part of an effort to illustrate and shape the cognitive habits necessary for experimental science in the Baconian tradition. Beyond stylistic recommendations, Cowley was interested in understanding what makes for accurate perception and reasoned judgment, both of which were essential to poets and experimental scientists alike in this formative period. This essay places Cowley's poetry in the context of seventeenth-century conventions for style and perception among experimental scientists and concludes by examining how Thomas Sprat, Royal Society historian and Cowley's literary executor, understood the value of Cowley's poetry to Royal Society epistemological aims.

“The Raven” and the Antebellum Culture of Bereavement

Abstract Despite the worldwide familiarity of “The Raven,” few readers are aware of the antebellum era’s elaborate cultural prescriptions for mourning that shape the poem and its thematic significance. For a missing perspective on Poe’s poem concerns the speaker’s representative behavior as genteel middle-class mourner, with the mysterious bird taking on the role of consolatory visitor, but a visitor who implicitly mocks the prescribed role of spiritual sympathizer by suggesting demonic doubts about the era’s evangelical hope of reunion in the afterlife with the beloved. Such a thematic emphasis is enhanced by the intertextual relationship of “The Raven” with relevant passages in the Bible as well as poems by Elizabeth Barrett, Gottfried August Bürger, and Felicia Hemans. While the scene enacted in “The Raven” anticipates the mourning that Poe would undergo following the death of his twenty-four-year-old wife Virginia in January 1847, it also illustrates the desperate hope for spiritual reunion notably seen in the bereavement behavior of Rufus W. Griswold, Poe’s notorious literary executor, whose young wife died in November 1842.

The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe edited by Roger Teichmann, (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2022); pp. 520, £ 97.00, hbk

The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe edited by Roger Teichmann, (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2022); pp. 520, £ 97.00, hbk

Poe in Richmond: Celebrating the Poe Museum’s Centennial

Poe in Richmond: Celebrating the Poe Museum’s Centennial

Generative Revision: Beyond the Zero-Sum Game

Generative Revision:Beyond the Zero-Sum Game Monica Youn (bio) I started off thinking about this essay's topic as a way of dealing with writer's block. I could be wrong, but in my subjective experience, poets complain about being blocked more than artists in any other discipline or genre. And one reason for that may be that, at least in the Western tradition, we have the least helpful model of artistic process. Apparently, we're supposed to sit around passively until something called a Muse—which may or may not be bird-shaped—descends from on high and breathes into us some sort of gas called inspiration. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen as regularly as one might hope. Hence, poets turn to substances, inappropriate romantic partners, and K-dramas. I watch my friends in other artistic disciplines, and rather than waste too much time beating themselves up about inspiration, they spend a higher percentage of it actually working. Claude Monet, after he painted the haystack, didn't spend the next week agonizing over what will I paint next? He just painted the haystack again. [End Page 377] As it turns out, poets also subject themselves to deeply unhelpful models of revision. The prevailing one is what I call the "zero-sum" model, in which the latest version of a poem substitutes absolutely for the old version, which is lost forever. The patron saint of this approach might be Elizabeth Bishop, whose nineteen extant versions of "One Art" bolster my theory. This is the first draft: Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 378] And here, of course, is the iconic final version: The art of losing isn't hard to master;so many things seem filled with the intentto be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the flusterof lost door keys, the hour badly spent.The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster:places, and names, and where it was you meantto travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, ornext-to-last, of three loved houses went.The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gestureI love) I shan't have lied. It's evidentthe art of losing's not too hard to masterthough it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. It's instructive to note what didn't make the cut from the initial draft: the starting daily losses that seem to have triggered the poem (reading glasses, a favorite pen, keys); some, but not all, of the speaker's remembered places (a peninsula, an island, a beach, a [End Page 379] bay); and even the most emotionally resonant images of the original version—the blue eyes, the intelligent hands of Bishop's lover and literary executor, Alice Methfessel. All these elements fall victim to the scythe of Bishop's notoriously ruthless editorial eye and are discarded in the landfill of unwanted images. Surely there must be a kinder, more eco-friendly way … Luckily for us, there is another model of revision, which I call "generative revision," or "non-zero-sum revision." And because I prefer to belabor my metaphors past the point of all reason, I'll discuss this generative, non-zero-sum approach using four different mathematical operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In this alternative model, rather than replacing the original, the revision coexists with it, offering expansions, alternatives, sub-versions, and offspring that enrich the original work. My model of generative revision has its own patron saint: Emily Dickinson. Here is the final stanza of Dickinson's great poem of unfulfilled love "I Cannot Live With You" (poem 640): So We must meet apart –You there – I – here –With just the Door ajarThat Oceans are – and Prayer –And that White Sustenance –Despair – What you've just read is the official, authorized ending of this explosive, daring...

The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics

The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics

Mircea Cărtărescu Stares Down the Abyss

Mircea Cărtărescu Stares Down the Abyss Matt Weir (bio) Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, trans. by Sean Cotter Deep Vellum, 2022, 672 pp. We are living in a golden era of publishing. Bowker, the company that assigns ISBN numbers to all new books, calculated that in the United States in 2018 there were 1,677,781 new self-published works. Much of this output is enabled by Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform, on which anyone can upload a Word document and turn it into an e-book. The literary theorist Mark McGurl has argued that a significant percentage of these e-books are novels that nobody has ever read. (Judging by the typos and formatting errors he discovered in his research, many may not have been read even by their authors.) These thousands upon thousands of unopened mysteries, romances, and post-apocalyptic fantasies surely hold secrets of contemporary life—maybe even more so because they haven't been read. "Doesn't the very uselessness of the great unread of contemporary fiction bring it into ironic alignment with the work of genius in the great tradition of aesthetic theory?" McGurl asks in Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. "The latter's power has always been understood to be a function of its transcendence of mere utility." McGurl is right that what ideological power literature still retains is directly related to the contradictory [End Page 112] uselessness and necessity of its great works. But he misses a point of contrast that is worth noting: whereas the author of I Married a Billionaire Zombie 6 rushes work into a marketplace where it finds no takers, some of the most celebrated and influential literary practitioners have been those whose process has included an aversion to publication. Emily Dickinson died with the bulk of her oeuvre locked in her room. Fernando Pessoa, who published only one book in his lifetime, left behind more than 25,000 pages. Franz Kafka asked for his unfinished work to be incinerated. After Kafka's death, his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, found two separate undated letters expressing this wish. The burnt offerings would have included, among so much else, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika. Just as literature's time-consuming uselessness represents to some a problem in need of a solution (reading is therapeutic, educational, etc.), so do Kafka's request and Brod's denial of it. Who was right? Or, does Brod's gesture, as Elif Batuman wrote while covering a trial involving disputed papers from Kafka's estate, confirm "that Kafka's works weren't even Kafka's private property but, rather, belonged to humanity?" For many, the situation of the publication-averse masterpiece-generator escapes—and exposes—the gravity of market logic in everyday life. Mircea Cărtărescu, perhaps the most acclaimed Romanian writer alive, boasts a long, international-award-winning bibliography of poetry and prose. And yet, in his anti-realistic fiction, he often speaks through narrators hostile to publication and recognition. In the first story he ever wrote, "The Roulette Player," which opens the collection Nostalgia, an aging writer of some renown denigrates his previous work as mere "powder and dust." In contrast, the story we're reading, "these ten, fifteen pages, they are a different matter, a different game," because no one other than the author will read them. In Cărtărescu's second story ever written, "Mentardy," the narrator interrupts the tale of a supernaturally strange child to note, "I am not so sure I wish to read this text in our literary circle. It is not really literature, and it's becoming too much of something else." Cărtărescu, a literature professor in Bucharest, has been, since his youth, an enthusiastic reader of Pynchon, and, like Pynchon, he has a knack for hallucinatory tension. When his conceit is that the story will never be read, the reader evaporates into a fantastical vacuum. Additionally, Cărtărescu has claimed to have an unusual, almost anti-professional writing process, one that flouts the conventions of readying-for-publication: he composes his novels and stories longhand, and he doesn't edit...

Books Received

Books Received Mark I. West The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien. Edited by Richard Ovenden and Catherine McIlwaine. Bodleian Library Publishing, 2022. As J. R. R. Tolkien's son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien completed and brought into print many of his father's unfinished manuscripts. The contributors to this collection examine Christopher Tolkien's work as an editor, scholar, and writer in his own right. The book also includes many photographs, drawings, and reproductions of manuscript pages. This collection should appeal to anyone who is interested in the field of Tolkien studies. Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America. By Korey Garibaldi. Princeton University Press, 2023. Korey Garibaldi, an American Studies professor at the University of Notre Dame, examines the history of interracial publishing in the United States from the 1910s to the 1960s. For readers interested in the history of African American children's literature, Garibaldi's third chapter, titled "Challenging Little Black Sambo," is especially pertinent. Perspectives on East and Southeast Asian Folktales. Edited by Allyssa Mc-Cabe and Minjeong Kim. Lexington Books, 2022. This volume is part of a series titled Studies in Folklore and Ethnology: Traditions, Practices, and Identities. The contributors to this volume examine folktales from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, China, Japan, and Korea. The essays are organized into the following sections: "Folkloristic Perspective," "Cultural Perspective," "Psychological Perspective," and "Educational Perspective." The three essays in the "Educational Perspective" section are especially relevant for readers interested in how these folktales relate to children's literature and culture. The Quentin Blake Book. By Jenny Uglow. Thames & Hudson, 2022. Jenny Uglow provides readers with a fully illustrated overview of Quentin Blake's career as an artist and illustrator of children's books. She focuses much of the book on Blake's relationships with the various authors with whom he collaborated, such as Roald Dahl, Russell Hoban, and John Yeoman. [End Page 417] Copyright © 2023 Children's Literature Association

On Sarah Bernhardt’s Cancelled Production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé

In late June 1892, the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays, Edward Smyth Pigott, declined to licence Sarah Bernhardt’s planned production in London of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Details of how the play would have been staged are limited. This has led to much debate about how—or even if—the Dance of the Seven Veils, a centrepiece of the play, would have been performed. Conversely, assumptions about casting, though supported only by circumstantial evidence, have hardened into facts. Here I note previously overlooked sources that speak to both of these points. The descriptioné of the Dance of the Seven Veils in Wilde’s script is famously brief: ‘salomé danse la danse des sept voiles’.1 The freedom that Wilde gifted readers and, later, stage directors to imagine the dance for themselves also obscured whatever might have been his own vision. Wilde’s friend and literary executor Robert Ross left the only clue of any substance when he averred, five years after Wilde’s death, that the author had not wanted ‘anything in the nature of Loie Fuller’s performances’.2 Fuller had achieved prominence in Paris in the 1890s with her ‘serpentine dance’, in which she manoeuvred large veils using hand-held poles while illuminated by coloured lights; she devised Salomé choreographies in 1895 and 1907.3

Carolyn Dever. Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diaries of Michael Field

Michael Field, the pseudonymous authorial persona of Katharine Bradley and her niece, lover, and life partner Edith Cooper (they characterized themselves as ‘closer married’ that Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning), was the author of one of the most expansive and, until recently, neglected oeuvres in fin de siècle literature. Their published output included 27 verse dramas, eight volumes of lyric poetry, and a handful of short prose pieces. But arguably their greatest achievement was Works and Days, a 28-volume, 9500-page diary, which primarily covers the years 1888 until Bradley’s death in 1914 (Cooper predeceased her by nine months in 1913). Yet the diary has remained largely inaccessible to most readers. While Bradley and Cooper’s literary executor Thomas Sturge Moore (alongside his son) edited a single volume of selected entries in 1933, and a small selection edited by Ivor Treby was published in 2006, viewing the diary in all its messy magnificence required a visit to the British Library’s Manuscripts Reading Room (or from 2003 access to a microfilm copy and the patience of a saint). Yet from around 2015 onwards, the diaries have been digitized and are in the process of being transcribed, saving the neophyte reader the perils and pleasures of familiarizing themselves with Bradley and Cooper’s orthography. The volumes are a treasure trove: Michael Field encountered just about every important figure in fin de siècle literary London and penned vivid (and often amusingly virulent) pen sketches of Robert Browning, Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Berenson, among many others. More importantly, Bradley and Cooper wrote beautifully about their love for one another, their creative process, their intellectual development, and the tragedy and beauty that dominated their lives. Despite its richness and value, the diary has yet to receive sustained critical analysis, until now.

My Campaign in Ireland. Part I:Catholic University Reports and Other Papers ed. by John Henry Newman

Reviewed by: My Campaign in Ireland. Part I:Catholic University Reports and Other Papers ed. by John Henry Newman Gerriet Suiter My Campaign in Ireland. Part I:Catholic University Reports and Other Papers BY JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, EDITED, INTRODUCTION, AND NOTES BY PAUL SHRIMPTON Leominster, UK: Gracewing, 2021. 660 pages. Hardback: £35. ISBN: 9780852444092. Though the 2020s have only just begun, Paul Shrimpton's critical edition of Newman's posthumously published My Campaign in Ireland: Part I will almost certainly be one of the greatest contributions in the present decade for students and scholars of Newman's educational thought. As Shrimpton notes in his introduction, the Campaign was edited by William Payne Neville, Newman's literary executor, and privately printed in 1896, but original print copies are "vanishingly rare," and it was never re-issued. The absence, until now, of a widely-available version of My Campaign in Ireland has obscured what is almost certainly the greatest supplement to Newman's three published volumes on education, those being best known in the forms of the two parts of The Idea of a University and Rise and Progress of the Universities. This absence has been partly ameliorated by digitized scans being available through archive.org and the Digital Collections of the National Institute for Newman Studies, as well as many of the individual documents that make up the Campaign being included in the final volume of the collected Letters and Diaries xxxii. Those partial remedies are now in great part eclipsed by this critical edition. Before turning to the features of the critical edition, a few words about the content and significance of the Neville's edition are in order. The central documents of the Campaign are Newman's annual reports to the archbishops for the academic years 1854–1855, 1855–1856, and 1856–1857. These were the first three years of the Catholic University of Ireland in the course of its actual operation. They offer a unique voice, as being especially concerned with the practical implementation of a university, which Newman's published volumes do not do, nor profess to attempt. Shrimpton's introduction is a judicious and valuable piece, running to 28 pages. As he himself notes, his introduction does not need to cover a great deal, as Neville's 64-page advertisement undertook that task—but there are some important exceptions. First, he ably makes the case for why The Idea of a University is incomplete with respect to the totality of Newman's thoughts on university education, yet many are familiar only with the Idea and take it as complete in itself. Most importantly, Shrimpton explains Neville's role and intentions and the historical context in which the Campaign was printed. [End Page 97] The critical notes throughout the text are copious and thorough. Shrimpton demonstrates himself a master of both the primary and secondary literature, weaving in references to Newman's published volumes, to the Letters and Diaries, to the secondary literature on Newman, and to the secondary literature on period matters, such as the London University. At appropriate points, he corrects important misconceptions that have occurred, and which recur, among some scholars and many readers of Newman, as for instance the role of research in the university (220). The reader familiar with Newman scholarship on these points will find no notable omission, and the reader new to the topic can hardly do better than to compile a bibliography from Shrimpton's footnotes. It is one drawback that it must be so compiled, as the end matter does not include a collected bibliography. To return again to the critical notes, they add incalculable value to the Campaign as a document. William Neville's advertisement was always a good introduction to the contents of the volume and the Catholic University of Ireland, but it acquires a new force and unity with the addition of footnotes, and so it truly shines. Shrimpton is able, as well, to add details that Neville was unaware of, like the resolution of the mystery of Newman's bishopric. Other outstanding critical notes include the relationship between the essence and the integrity of a university (142), Newman's conception of the genius loci...

V. Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories [Kolymskie rasskazy] in translations by J. Glad and D. Rayfield

The article offers a quick historical overview of the English translations of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories [Kolymskie rasskazy]. The first translation of a big selection of stories was made by J. Glad: the selected tales were published by W.W. Norton & Company in two volumes (Kolyma Stories in 1980 and Graphite in 1981), to be printed as a single volume in 1994 under the title Kolyma Stories. A new and superior edition appeared in the years 2018 and 2020 — the two-volume Kolyma Stories translated by D. Rayfield; his complete translation is based on the authorial text published in Russia by Shalamov’s literary estate executor I. Sirotinskaya. This ensures that the cycle’s compositional integrity is intact. Agreeing with the opinion expressed by A. Osipova in her review ‘The Forced Conversion of Varlam Shalamov’ in The Los Angeles Review of Books, we recognise Rayfield’s achievements in conveying Shalamov’s terse style and masterful use of detail, including details as symbols or signs — the cornerstone of Shalamov’s writings. Also analysed are the theses in A. Valles’ Introduction to the second volume, which suggest the importance of a philological reading of Shalamov’s works.

George D. Kilpatrick and the Textual Criticism of the New Testament: Three Variants from his Nachlass Discussed

Among the unpublished papers by G.D. Kilpatrick written in the 1950s are the three notes printed here. They were prepared for BABELAO by J. Keith Elliott, who served as his literary executor. The notes concern textual variants at Mark 2:21; Hebrews 12:24 and Revelation 2:14. They contain Kilpatrick's suggested corrections of our printed editions there. It is to be hoped that these apparent minutiae will serve more widely as useful guides to all editors.

Stanley Cavell and the Everyday of Thinking

Abstract In the summer of 2019, the Cavell family, acting as literary executors of Stanley Cavell's estate, designated Eric Ritter to organize and catalogue the masses of books and documents and papers with which Cavell had filled his study. In the process, Ritter found a surprising amount of unpublished work and presents some of it here for the first time. Building on the archival work as well as on recent scholarship, this article presents Cavell's conception of philosophy as the public expression of moral perfectionist practice, for which writing is catalyst, medium, and result. The article then enumerates some consequences that follow from this conception, especially a certain relation of philosophy to the arts and to a notion of philosophical pluralism. It also suggests that key themes in Cavell's work already converse implicitly with ongoing debates about “American Philosophy” and have great potential to do so more explicitly.

Living Philosophy in Kierkegaard, Melville, and Others: Intersections of Literature, Philosophy, and Religion by Edward F. Mooney

Reviewed by: Living Philosophy in Kierkegaard, Melville, and Others: Intersections of Literature, Philosophy, and Religion by Edward F. Mooney Steven Knepper Edward F. Mooney Living Philosophy in Kierkegaard, Melville, and Others: Intersections of Literature, Philosophy, and Religion New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. xiii+ 186 pp. Before turning to Edward Mooney's reading of Moby-Dick in Living Philosophy in Kierkegaard, Melville, and Others, it is helpful to know something about the twentieth-century American philosopher Henry Bugbee. Mooney is Bugbee's literary executor, and he has done much to preserve Bugbee's legacy and to keep his work in print. Bugbee's early attempts to show the philosophical significance of Moby-Dick, themselves deserving of more attention, influenced Mooney's own approach to life, philosophy, and Melville's magnum opus. When Bugbee arrived at Harvard in 1948, he was asked to give a talk to graduate students and faculty. He began his talk by reading from "The Line" chapter of Moby-Dick. This was an unorthodox move at the time, and it likely did not help the junior professor's Ivy League career. The more literary and religious pragmatism of William James and William Ernest Hocking had faded away in Harvard's philosophy department. Positivism was ascendant. Though liked by his colleagues, Bugbee would not receive tenure. He went on to a long career at the University of Montana, however, and in 1958 he published a remarkable work of philosophy in journal form titled The Inward Morning. It offers a homegrown existentialism with roots not only in Zen Buddhism and European thought but also in Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville—the United States' own proto-existentialists. At one point in The Inward Morning, Bugbee wonders, "How much of Moby Dick is Melville's heeding of the voice out of the whirlwind in the Book of Job? In both it is the meaning of the independent thing which seems to emerge, and the presence of the thing is the cleansing of man" (Bugbee, Jr., Henry G. The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976. p. 226). Leviathan, in both Melville's novel and the Book of Job, chastens our claims to mastery. As a naval veteran of the Second World War and an avid angler, Bugbee knew [End Page 125] something about water reveries, about what Moby-Dick's first chapter calls "the ungraspable phantom of life" whose image one can glimpse—but only glimpse—"in all rivers and oceans." Edward Mooney, like Bugbee, philosophizes in the first person, in a style often episodic and at times epiphanic. He, too, draws inspiration from existentialists on the one hand and Emerson and Thoreau on the other. He writes about existential concerns such as reverence, wonder, gratitude, fear, relationships, and solitude. It is unsurprising, then, that Mooney, who is professor emeritus in philosophy and religion at Syracuse University, would eventually offer his own reflections on Melville. Living Philosophy gathers and revises several of Mooney's recent lectures and essays, including one on Moby-Dick that first appeared in Corey McCall and Tom Nurmi's excellent 2017 collection, Melville among the Philosophers. In Living Philosophy that essay is reworked into two chapters on Melville. Mooney offers many of his own insights and reveries, but his general approach to Melville's novel recalls Bugbee's. Moby-Dick is about the mystery of nature and life, epitomized by the sea. A scientific approach (a cetology, say) can uncover much useful and fascinating information (though it can also facilitate instrumentalism, reducing whales to barrels of oil, for instance). Such an approach, however, cannot reach the deepest mysteries: How should we live? How should we live together? Why is there something rather than nothing? How do we respond to evil? How do we respond to beauty? "The meaning of the white whale or divinity," Mooney explains, "of love and comradery, of demonic powers of hatred, are elusive" (44). The mystery that underlies these questions and topics draws us to the water, but it only ever yields brief soundings. As Mooney says, it gives us partial, fragmentary "glimpses of truth" (47). Ultimately, the mystery is not something to be solved or dissolved but...

Willa Cather's Letters in the Archive

Stories of how American novelist Willa Cather recalled and burned her letters in order to preserve her privacy are cited widely in biography and criticism. This essay argues that these stories (and related stories about the destruction of letters by Cather’s partner and literary executor, Edith Lewis) have been exaggerated well beyond the mod- est facts. While some letters were destroyed, neither Cather nor Lewis made a systematic practice of recalling and destroying letters, yet claims that they did have shaped the way scholars understand Cather’s experience of her lesbian sexuality. Cather’s extant epistolary archive has turned out to be far more substantial than such stories led scholars to believe. The example of Cather suggests that scholars need to recognize the dynamic nature of preservation and collecting and consider the specific forces and interested parties shaping access to the traces of particular women’s legacies.

Review of Friedrich August von Hayek’s Draft Biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Text and Its History, edited by Christian Erbacher

Friedrich von Hayek’s Unfinished Draft of a Sketch of a Biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein was the first attempt at the task of assembling a comprehensible picture of the life of his pre-eminent cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein. As the title might suggest, von Hayek never finished this task, his efforts being stymied by both Wittgenstein’s literary executors and Wittgenstein’s sister, Margaret Stonborough. Here, and for the first time, Christian Erbacher presents the first real publication of this draft, with accompanying commentary, and an afterword by Allan Janik.
 Perhaps the best way to describe Erbacher’s work here is as a ‘biography of a biography’. His introduction to von Hayek’s manuscript details the story behind its creation, beginning with an outline of von Hayek’s own relationship with Wittgenstein, and the parallels between their academic careers. In doing so, Erbacher not only also describes the history of von Hayek’s sketch, but also the history of Wittgenstein-biography as a genre in itself. For what emerges from Erbacher’s extensive work in researching the von Hayek sketch is that, despite never coming to fruition itself, the work that von Hayek put into collecting the materials for writing a biography of Wittgenstein was hugely influential in all future endeavours of chronicling Wittgenstein’s life.

Dedication: A. Tappan Wilder

This second issue of Volume One of the Thornton Wilder Journal is dedicated to Amos Tappan Wilder in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his assuming the position of Thornton Wilder's literary executor. Tappy, as he is called by all who know him, has been responsible for making available many of his uncle's previously unpublished (or obscurely published) works, first in The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volumes 1 and 2 (TCG Press), then in the HarperCollins paperback re-issues of Wilder's seven novels and three major plays, for which Tappy researched and wrote all of the critical afterwords. He worked with J. D. McClatchy to collect Wilder's plays, fiction, and selected essays in three Library of America volumes. He arranged for the publication of Wilder's American acting version of Ibsen's A Doll's House, which once held the record for the longest Broadway run of this modern classic. Furthermore, thanks to Tappy's generosity and open-mindedness, several of Wilder's works have been adapted into other art forms, for example, David Greenspan's 2018 stage version of Wilder's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and he has green-lighted innovative productions, such as the highly successful Our Town directed by David Cromer in 2009. Tappy has been a supporter of the Thornton Wilder Society from its incorporation in 2000, and has participated in all Society events, including the three international Wilder conferences. In short, the works and legacy of Thornton Wilder have thrived under Tappy's stewardship, for which we, the editors of the Thornton Wilder Journal along with the Thornton Wilder Society Board of Directors, are greatly appreciative.

Editors' Note

Much has happened since our inaugural issue was published last February. Our second issue is coming out in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic and widespread protests against racism and police violence. As proven before in times of crisis, Wilder's words and humanistic/philosophical vision continue to inspire and give hope. In the midst of the Great Depression, Wilder's novel Heaven's My Destination (1935) used comedy to entertain its American readers as it prompted them to deeper self-reflection; his two full-length plays, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), offered their audiences respectively profound appreciation of the smallest moments and an unwavering faith in our ability to survive World War II. During another crisis, at the memorial service for victims of the 9/11 attacks, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair quoted Wilder's visionary lines ending his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927): “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”As we remain sheltered-in-place due to the pandemic, access to Wilder's works has become easier. In May the Wilder Family and HarperCollins's legendary audio imprint Caedmon released five out of eight of Wilder's novels as digital audiobooks. Now you can listen to The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Cabala, Heaven's My Destination, The Ides of March, and The Woman of Andros, the latter four being available in audio for the first time. Later this year Caedmon will publish the remaining two novels, The Eighth Day and Theophilus North, as audiobooks. To keep Wilder's theater audiences engaged when unable to attend actual productions, Thornton Wilder Society board member Shoshana Greenberg has organized two Zoom play readings of The Skin of Our Teeth (May) and The Matchmaker (July). And in this issue of Thornton Wilder Journal, we are bringing you a selection of new Wilder criticism. The articles range from Nancy Bunge's analysis of how Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy explains the lasting popularity of Wilder's classic Our Town, to Ann Caldwell's theorizing about the prominence of the American Southwest as Wilder's “creative and spiritual home,” to Jamall A. Calloway's interdisciplinary probing of the relevance Social Gospel ethics may have to Our Town, to Ashley Raven's discussion of how to teach Our Town through a dramaturgical lens, and Wesley Longacre's summary of Wilder scholarship since 2016. For those who long for the reopening of theaters, we include five reviews of notable 2019 productions of Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and a rare staging of The Seven Deadly Sins, a collection of Wilder's late one-acts, that took place at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts.Besides the mixture of critical essays and significant production reviews, in this issue we introduce three kinds of material we hope to feature going forward: essays on teaching (Raven), biographical essays (Caldwell), and an annual review of Wilder scholarship and criticism (Longacre). We also draw your attention in Caldwell's essay to references to hard-to-locate articles and an interview with Wilder that was previously unknown. In future issues we plan to include previously unpublished Wilder letters and other primary documents as well as obscure secondary materials.Although many will remember 2020 for the global pandemic and social unrest, in the annals of Wilder Studies, in truly Wilderian style, this year will mark significant accomplishments and contributions to the continuing vitality of Wilder's artistic legacy in the twenty-first century. We congratulate Tappan Wilder on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his becoming Wilder's literary executor. It has also been twenty years since the founding of the Thornton Wilder Society, and this issue completes the first year of the Thornton Wilder Journal. We hope you will help us celebrate these important milestones by reading and contributing to our journal and joining the Society. We look forward to hearing your voices, reading your submissions, and continuing the conversation on all things Wilder.