Word: buckram
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Frank Page is the upstanding young editor who narrates the novel, an account of the workings of Belles Lettres from its beginnings as the plaything of the rich and cultivated Winifred Buckram to its present as a property of Protean Publications, whose owner, Cyrus Tooling, is less cultivated. His response to the journal's list of 25 important American writers: "Who the f is Harold Brodkey? And where the f is Herman Wouk...
Foreign writers have rumbled across America in buckram and paperback trying to conquer it, to understand it. But Americans themselves now seem to have trouble imagining their country. The terms and arrangements of the American enterprise are changing. The entire American proposition has been built upon the premise of ever expanding opportunity, upon a vision of the future as a territory open-ended and always unfolding, upon ascendant history. "We are the heirs of all time," said Herman Melville. What happens if the future seems to be closing down, to be darkening? If nature, first an enemy to be subdued...