One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.
When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.