My chief occupation for the past six summers has been as a fire lookout in the Black Range District of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. For ten of every fourteen days I sit and watch for smoke from a mountain ten-thousand feet high. From my tower I can see at least fifty miles in each direction—on clear days nearly a hundred.

I’m only able to really get going once I stop trying to seek a way out. 

When I discovered my first maze among the pages of a coloring book, I dutifully guided the mouse in the margins toward his wedge of cheese at the center. I dragged my crayon through narrow alleys and around comers, backing out of dead ends, trying this direction instead of that. Often I had to stop and rethink my strategy, squinting until some unobstructed path became clear and I could start to move the crayon again.

You feel a gradual welling up of pleasure, or boredom, or melancholy. Whatever the emotion, it’s more abundant than you ever dreamed. You can no more contain it than your hands can cup a lake. And so you surrender and suck the air.

While Malcolm Cowley’s career as a critic, literary historian, and poet is well-known and highly regarded, one element of his long career remains relatively unexplored. He was a prolific correspondent—his letters reflect not only his personality but his discerning judgments about what he termed “the literary situation.” 

The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century. 

When through who the unotherish twilight up drops but his nib licks Sir Oral Ne Ferdinand Joegesq’ (disarmed to the nonteeth by lose able scripture befisto-zr-P—nd subjesting etsemina our light written) and him as mightily distant from a fit of the in cheerful as am our hero but naturally encore when the ittorian extroverts Well why not send your portrait of you and your portrait of me? J, says sprouts, it ch’ll bepigged, if only in the name of Adver the Tisement;but will they immaculate it on t’other conception(meaning Brussels) which being respond fully pre answered we thus forth are proseeding.

The Paris theatre has undergone almost a complete change since the beginning of the Second World War. The occupation years, though lean and terrible ones, witnessed the dawn. Henry de Montherlant’s La Reine Morte was created at the Comedie-Francaise in 1942 and in 1943 Gerard Philippe made his debut in Jean Giraudoux’s Sodome et Gomorrhe at the Hebertot. Jean Anouilh’s Antigone was produced the following year, as was Jean-Paul Sartre’s first play, Les Mouches, while the 1940-45 period saw the staging of Andre Roussin’s initial comedies.