When Time magazine profiled him in March 1964, John Cheever wrote an entry in his journal which imagined his daughter Susan's thoughts:

After they put Daddy's picture on the cover of Time, he seemed to lose something… I don't mean like Dorian Gray or anything but like a savage who thinks that if he is photographed he will have lost part of his image. A man came up to the house … and painted a picture of Daddy. It was painted in a definite style, a magazine cover style, and Daddy seemed to get himself mixed up with all the kings and presidents and so forth who had been on the cover before him. I mean he seemed in some way locked into the cover, fixed there, impressed on the paper. Once I lost my temper at him and said I don't think anybody's impressed by the fact that you had your face on Time magazine … They have all kinds of people; broken down ball players and crooks. It hurt his feelings, you could see.

Cheever's words give some suggestion both of the importance authors attached to the Time cover story, which at the peak of the magazine's influence was widely perceived as the apotheosis of American fame, and of their confusion over what it actually signified. This essay aims to explore this ambivalence by investigating the ways in which Time featured novelists, poets and playwrights as the subjects of its cover stories in the period from the magazine's first issue in 1923 to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it began to lose some of its status as “the National Poet Laureate.” Time owed this status to its position as champion of the “middlebrow,” being designed “for the lady from Dubuque … and for the President of the United States” and combining commercial success with semi-institutional legitimacy.

At the opening of a magnificent career in fiction, Henry James's first novel, Watch and Ward, has appeared gauche, bizarre and unaccountable. With its overtones of incest and paedophilia, it is hard to imagine what James can have been thinking of. Yet he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton, whose opinion he respected, apparently assuming that Norton would understand what he was trying to do. Perhaps a text offered with such optimism is not quite the anomaly it seems at first sight: it may in fact have been conceived within a context and in response to circumstances clear to its author but long since obscured.

H. L. Mencken's antagonism to women's issues seems paradoxical in a man so committed to emancipation and the reexamination of conventional social roles — the very goals for which the women's movement was fighting during the early decades of the twentieth century. The apparent discord of Mencken's attacks on suffragettes, his deprecating depictions of womanhood, and his thinly veiled vilification of women as a source of cultural mediocrity have spurred critics to explain, reformulate, or deny Mencken's disturbing prejudice. Edward A. Martin quixotically suggests that Mencken only “posed as an antifeminist,” while Charles A. Fecher wonders why “today's advocates of ‘women's liberation’ have not resurrected In Defense of Women” — Mencken's lashing satire on the female in America, grossly misread by Fecher as a tribute to women's “intelligence.” But Mencken was not “posing” as an antifeminist any more than he was pretending to be anti-Philistine. His views of women were not only consistent with his own cultural philosophy but joined a paradigm of masculinism underlying the definition of American culture during these years.

This essay does not deny Mencken's considerable contributions to the scene of American letters in the early twentieth century. Alarm at the recently published diaries — which illustrate Mencken's disposition to be “careless of the decencies” in his random remarks on African-Americans and Jews — while justified, often de-contextualizes his opinions from the wider cultural atmosphere. Regarding his views on women as well, I argue that metaphoric and broadly philosophical foundations place many of his views within a larger climate of opinion seeking to link the rise of the feminine with intellectual mediocrity.

Between 1953 and 1961 Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School developed the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) beginning in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Within the program from 1957 onwards Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson developed Citizenship Schools centered on literacy classes. By slowly developing local leaders, like Esau Jenkins, the CEP evolved as an educational framework for social mobilization, which was later used by the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. In the summer of 1961, since the Folk School faced closure by Tennessee state authorities, Highlander transferred the CEP to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Between 1961 and 1970, hundreds of civil rights activists from across the South attended the SCLC's Citizenship School teacher training courses at the Dorchester Center near Savannah in south-east Georgia. Moreover, in the mid-1960s the Southwide Voter Education Project enabled civil rights activists from across the region to study the political organization that the CEP had spawned in Charleston county as a model for their own community work. Given its widespread influence, the CEP's work was a vital aspect of the Civil Rights Movement itself and constituted Highlander's chief contribution to it.

The recent writings of Thomas McGuane show a particular interest in environmentalist concerns, examining the role played by inherited mythologies of the frontier in the ecology and politics of the contemporary American West. McGuane's explorations reveal complex and ambivalent responses to these subjects, in part liberal, radical and conservative.

This essay will discuss these issues in relation to contemporary American attitudes to nature. The basis for my approach will be to assume that conceptions of “nature” are socially constructed, and that “nature” and “culture” are separate but mutually interdependent. The relationship between human societies and the natural world will therefore be considered as an ongoing process in which the term “nature” must not be wholly subsumed under that of “culture.” Environmental history is, as Donald Worster puts it, “a story of reciprocity and interaction rather than of culture replacing nature.”

Thomas McGuane's writings tend both to repeat and to question what may be called “traditional” or “Romantic” attitudes to nature. In particular, he combines both aesthetic and utilitarian perspectives: nature as a scene of spiritual restoration through the appreciation of beauty, and as the object of technological mastery and control. In practice, these two approaches are historically interrelated, in that they are both responses to, and constructions of, nature produced within an urban capitalist society. As Walter J. Ong has argued, a necessary precondition for Romantic attitudes to nature is a society that has confidence in its capacity to dominate nature, through the use of the very industrial technologies such attitudes ostensibly reject.