Robert B. Heilman: his life in letters

"Robert Bechtold Heilman was a great literary figure of the twentieth century. This collection of his correspondence includes over 600 exchanges with more than 100 correspondents, among them Saul Bellow, Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Eberhart, Charles Johnson, Bernard Malamud, and William Carlos Williams. The letters follow Heilman's career from the time he was a thirty-six-year-old member of Louisiana State University's English Department, through his tenure at the University of Washington from 1948 to 1975, until a few years before his death in 2004. Two of his appointees who spent their entire careers at the University of Washington, Edward Alexander and Richard Dunn, have edited the letters with Paul Jaussen." "The rich representation of letters to as well as from Heilman gives the reader access to decades-long conversations between him and Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Joseph Epstein, Theodore Roethke, and many others. They provide a sense of Heilman's.

Character, personality, and achievements in the context of American letters. They also afford an inside history of the changes that took place over sixty years, for better and worse, in American universities, literary criticism, and the politics of literature." "Heilman's major correspondents were learned and articulate masters of the epistolary art. To read his letters and theirs is to understand that Samuel Johnson's famous observation 'we shall receive no letters in the grave' was not a sigh of expected relief from nuisance and obligation but an anticipatory lament over the loss of a supreme pleasure."--Jacket.

Reading minds and intentions : the 1940s -- Categories of existence : the 1950s -- A mind grappling in a new way : the 1960s -- The kultur-kampf over literary studies : the 1970s -- Gains and losses : the 1980s -- Cast me not off in old age : the 1990s and beyond.