TRTR Very Misc....50s, Partisan Review crowd

[Paul Mackin]

On 9/7/2011 3:14 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> So, I pick up this nicely-made, solidly-done book which is John Gruen's
> memoirs...i recognize his name from NYTimes pieces...it is subtiltled
> a critic's memoirs and in it I learn when he was a bookseller at the 
> old Brentano's
> in NYC early in 50s of The Recognitions, in one of his earliest jobs 
> after college, he recognized one Oscar Williams
> browsing, famous anthologist and poet, known mostly then for his A 
> Little Treasury
> of American Poetry which our author had had at Iowa Writer's School 
> very recently,
> becasue a picture of Oscar's round face was on the book and, 
> introduced himself and soon he and
> his wife entered the highly prestigious, tightly-knit, competitive and 
> back-biting world of the so-called
> "little magazines".....
>                            TO BE CONTINUED
Provides an excuse to pull A Little Treasury down from the shelf. It's 
the revised edition of 1952, which is probably the one Brentano's had in 
stock.  (an English major once lived here)

Oscar was competitive enough to include a pretty good sample of his own 
poems in the section for major poets.

Several dozen of the greater names (including Oscar) have photos at the 
end of the book.  Mostly they are quarter page size except for Walt 
Whitman and T.S. Eliot, who rate a full page.

P
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