Tag

Fred Chappell

Blog

I’ll Take My Stand

Thomas H. Landess walked among Giants. He wrote and talked about them too. It was April of 1968, and he had gathered a few at the University of Dallas for a reunion under the banner of the Southern Literary Festival. It was a reunion of the surviving Southern Agrarians—Andrew Lytle, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren—Lyle Lanier…
Chase Steely
October 7, 2024
Blog

Ol’ Fred

FRED CHAPPELL was America's greatest living writer. Of that I have no doubt, not that the modern miasma of contemporary letters offered him much serious competition.  (His only rivals for the epithet were Cormac McCarthy, now passed, and Wendell Berry, nearing ninety.) He was a master of most every major literary genre - poetry, fiction, criticism, et al. His scope…
Randall Ivey
January 18, 2024
Review Posts

That Old Black Magic

A review of Fred Chappell, Familiars, LSU Press, 2014. The cat, the felis silverstrus catus, both wild and domesticated, has exercised a considerable fascination for the creative artist throughout the thousands of years of Western and non-Western civilization.  One need only peruse art and history books containing sculptures of the animal originating in Byzantium and Egypt, among other ancient locales,…
Randall Ivey
September 12, 2017