George P. Elliott

Contents: Survivors / Elsie Singmaster -- Lost Phoebe / Theodore Dreiser -- Golden honeymoon / Ring W. Lardner -- I'm a fool / Sherwood Anderson -- My old man / Ernest Hemingway -- Telephone call / Dorothy Parker -- Double birthday / Willa Cather -- Faithful wife / Morley Callaghan -- Little wife / William March -- Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald-- How beautiful with shoes / Wilbur Daniel Steele -- Resurrection of a life / William Saroyan -- Only the dead know Brooklyn / Thomas Wolfe -- Life in the day of a writer / Tess Slesinger -- Iron City / Lovell Thompson -- Christ in concrete / Pietro Di Donato -- Chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck -- Bright and morning star / Richard Wright -- Hand upon the waters / William Faulkner -- Net / Robert M. Coates -- Nothing ever breaks except the heart / Kay Boyle -- Search through the streets of the city / Irwin Shaw -- Who lived and died believing / Nancy Hale -- Peach stone / Paul Horgan -- Dawn of remembered spring / Jesse Stuart -- Catbird seat / James Thurber -- Of this time, of that place / Lionel Trilling -- Wind and the snow of winter / Walter Van Tilburg Clark -- Enormous radio / John Cheever -- Children are bored on Sunday / Jean Stafford -- NRACP / George P. Elliott -- In Greenwich there are many gravelled walks / Hortense Calisher -- Other foot / Ray Bradbury -- Three players of a summer game / Tennessee Williams -- Mother's tale / James Agee -- Magic barrel / Bernard Malamud -- Circle in the fire / Flannery O'Connor -- First flower / Augusta Wallace Lyons -- Contest for Aaron Gold / Philip Roth -- One ordinary day, with peanuts / Shirley Jackson -- To the wilderness I wander / Frank Butler -- Ledge / Lawrence Sargent Hall -- This morning, this evening, so soon / James Baldwin -- Tell me a riddle / Tillie Olsen -- Old army game / George Garrett -- Pigeon feathers / John Updike -- Sound of a drunken drummer / H.W. Blattner -- Keyhole eye / John Stewart Carter -- Long day's dying / William Eastlake -- Upon the sweeping flood / Joyce Carol Oates.

George P. Elliott, who died in 1980, is remembered both as a "writer's writer"--A master craftsman with an equal command of poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction--and as a gifted and dedicated teacher, one of the architects of the Syracuse University graduate writing program. The Bread Loaf Series of Contemporary Writers introduces a new generation of readers and students to this versatile man of letters. Collecting short stories, essays, and the long narrative poem. "Fever and Chills," this Reader reveals the range of Elliott's talents and his seemingly effortless command of the written word. The smooth, realistic style of his short stories enhances the emotional resonance of such pieces as "Hymn of Angels," or contrasts with the caustic satire of others, such as the darkly Orwellian "The N.R.A.C.P." His clear and elegant essays are constructed of incisive judgments and carefully considered opinions, founded on his sense of. Literature as a dynamic force, a mystery to be experienced, shared, and discussed. Among the pieces presented here is the previously uncollected "Snarls of Beauty," one of Elliott's strongest and most characteristic essays.