Southern Bookman

LSU historian Robert Mann's "Kingfish U" tells engrossing story of Huey Long's crushing love for LSU

LSU's band, football team and academic prestige rose under Huey Long's autocratic control of Louisiana during the dark years of the Depression.

After Long's assassination in 1935, the "Ole War Skule's" golden era crashed in scandal, leading to the imprisonment of LSU President James Monroe Smith and other university officials for a range of fraudulent schemes.

The wide-ranging federal and state investigations also led to the conviction of Gov. Richard Leche, for whom the university's law school had been named. His name was abruptly removed from the school's monumental building.

Long as governor and U.S. senator who still controlled the state embraced LSU like a smothering sugar daddy. He lavished money on school buildings, launched a medical school, and outrageously championed the school's band and football team.

LSU professor and noted historian Robert Mann entertainingly tells the story of Long and his proudest achievement in "Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU," published by LSU Press.

An outlandish political showman, Long took trainloads of LSU students to football games in Nashville and Houston, leading the band on parades through the cities' downtowns. He also enjoyed giving pep talks to the football team, although Coach Biff Jones banned "the Kingfish" from the locker room before Long fired the former Army officer.

Rapidly increasing its student body and constructing new buildings after a move from downtown Baton Rouge to a bucolic new campus that had once been a plantation on the Mississippi River, LSU attracted nationally recognized professors, most prominently Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, editors of the university's prestigious and ground=breaking Southern Review.

As Mann relates, Long generally kept his hands off academic matters. But he brought his beloved university national comdemnation for attempting to censor the Daily Reveille, the school's student newspaper, after it published a letter criticizing his iron-fisted control of the LSU Board of Supervisors.

Smith's expulsion of seven Reveille journalists brought an investigation by the Southern Association of  Colleges and Secondary Schools. The organization placed LSU on probation, then dropped its investigation when the school affirmed its commitment to academic independence following Long's death.

But Long's meddling with the LSU Law School led to censure by the Association of American Law Schools, a minor part of a ballooning scandal that engulfed the university and Long's machine following his assassination in a hallway of his soaring state Capitol in downtown Baton Rouge.

Mann gives a complete account of the scandals, especially the involvement of Leche, Smith and a number of LSU officials who used LSU material and state funds for personal projects.

Smith, who led the university's flourishing during the Depression and originated the Southern Review, ended up serving six years in the state penitentiary at Angola.

Long, one of the most divisive leaders in American history, gave his poverty-stricken state modern roads, schools and hospitals and propelled a small state university to national prominence.

Mocked by national writers for his clownish behavior and accumulation of power, Long before his death gained a national following for his "share our wealth" programs, which still appear radical.

Mann gives a balanced picture of a politician beloved by Louisiana's long-exploited poor. As Mann details, blacks gained little from his programs.

The book contains wonderful vintage photographs of Long, decked out in three-piece suits and fedoras, acting as chief cheerleader. He's shown with the band and students, or huddling with cronies. One picture shows Smith with several cows; rural students during the Depression could pay for their tuition with livestock or crops.

While Mann praises Long's accomplishments, he presents a disturbing picture of Long's schemes to acquire more power.

Long's flamboyant career was in the end tragic, as Robert Penn Warren mined in his classic novel"All the King's Men."

Warren found in Baton Rouge "a world of a sick yearning for elegance."

Louisiana's dreams of greatness come mixed with corruption and buffoonery.

 

 

 

 

United Talent Agency's arts exhibit space elevates Atlanta's cultural scene

Atlanta's receiving a burst of attention as a fine-arts center.

The United Talent Agency, which represents actors, comedians, screenwriters, musicians and artists, recently opened a fine arts exhibit space at its Atlanta office in Midtown.

That's a significant boost for the Atlanta arts scene. The Atlanta gallery is only UTA's second, following an earlier one in Beverly Hills.

The new gallery gives Atlanta artists fresh hopes that they no longer have to go elsewhere to find success.

Yet an article Wednesday in The New York Times Arts section raised doubts about whether the UTA space will benefit Atlanta and Southern artists, or mainly represent those with already established international reputations in New York or Los Angeles.

Writer Tariro Mzezewa's feature titled "Can a Global Talent Agency Make Atlanta an Arts Destination" expressed local arts boosters' expectations that regional artists will find the UTA a nurturing home. 

Displaying a regional awareness, the new gallery opened with Atlanta artist and musician Lonnie Holley's exhibit "The Eyes Were Always on Us," which continues through the end of April.

The black Birmingham native's works examine racial violence in the South, the struggle for civil rights and the perseverance of black culture.

While the new gallery should aspire to encourage regional talent, a mixture of international exhibitions will boost Atlanta's global stature, moving away from from the city's long-established provincialism. As a major international presence, the UTA center can accomplish multiple objectives.

UTA's arts gallery is another jewel for Atlanta's Peachtree cultural corridor, encompassing the Woodruff Arts Center, the Museum of Design Atlanta and the Peachtree branch of the Fulton County Library.

The Fox Theater rises a few blocks south, near the Atlanta History Center's Margaret Mitchell House, which has not yet reopened after shutting down during the Covid epidemic.

While Atlanta's fine arts and entertainment scenes flourish, the city's theater community suffers from declining audiences and funding.

As the city's movie lovers welcomed the imminent reopening of the Tara Theater, the Lyric Theater announced its closure after 42 seasons.

The Lyric's shutdown mobilized the Atlanta theater community, which issued an emergency letter calling for more financial support from corporations, business leaders and local and state government.

Atlanta's theaters are spread across the metro area. The failure of a campaign to build a grand opera house at the Woodruff Arts Center led to the Atlanta Opera Company joining the Braves in moving to Cobb County. The Atlanta Ballet Company also performs outside the city.

While suburban theaters have done admirable work through the years, Midtown's art district needs more live theater along with the Woodruff's Alliance and the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern.

A new professional company on Peachtree would showcase the original work of regional playwrights, as well as perform worthy plays from elsewhere. Midtown also needs a new music venue for classical, operatic and popular performances

The UTA gallery is only one step in Atlanta fulfilling its artistic dreams.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bill Gates, Thomas Friedman acclaim Artificial Intelligence's Brave New World

I am not a robot.

ChatGPT is not writing this piece.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and billionaire Bill Gates are in a frenzy over Artificial Intelligence, claiming it's as revolutionary as the printing press, the Internet and the steam engine.

The new Microsoft GPT-4 bot developed by OpenAI can whip out sonnets and abecedarian verse within seconds, according to Friedman's column this week.

Along with composing poems in which each line begins with a different letter of the alphabet, GPT-4 can almost instantaneously do translations in different languages, Friedman marveled.

I'm sure GPT-4 will soon be turning out Tom Friedman columns indistinguishable from the real thing.

Gates in his blog says AI will free humans from mundane tasks and allow us "to do things that software never will - teaching, caring for patients and supporting the elderly," according to the Wall Street Journal.

Why Artificial Intelligence can't teach and care for patients was not explained.

Against corporate opposition, office workers are using OpenAI's ChatGPT to write emails, memos and messages, according to a Wall Street Journal article. The workers say it improves productivity.

Or Artificial Intelligence could be nothing more than Quiet Quitting, last year's trend.

Perhaps Friedman and Gates are right, and AI will bring bring a new golden era of human development.

I remain skeptical, and plan to ignore Artificial Intelligence as much as possible, hoping it'll be destroyed all together.

Best wishes to Generation Z as they welcome the new age, but I'm too old for a little AI buddy.

For me, Shakespeare's sonnets will never by supplanted by something called GPT-4.

 

 

 

David Milch's "Life's Work" tells redemptive story of self-destruction, Hollywood fame

Only David Milch could have transformed St. Paul and the cross into Deadwood and the South Dakota gold rush.

Milch, famed TV producer and writer, details that shift in his entertaining, self-absorbed memoir "Life's Work."

Although Milch finished the book with the aid of his daughters while battling the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease, "Life's Work" gives a full account of his troubled childhood, heroin and gambling addiction, Yale education and  unlikely TV success.

The change from Christianity and the Roman Empire to gold and the American West is not that surprising coming from a writer who taught a course at Yale titled "Strategies of Indirection in Fiction."

Noted poet and critic William Logan in an article in the current New Criterion recalls taking the course, presenting a vivid portrait of Milch, an inveterate gambler on football games and horse racing and a superb writing teacher.

Milch in his memoir looks back on his career as a rebellious Yale undergraduate. Although seriously addicted to heroin and alcohol, and frequently in trouble with local law enforcement, Milch enjoyed a warm relationship with Yale professor, novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren.

Warren, as Milch fondly remembers, gave special attention to Milch's work, praising his novel in progress as containing the best dialogue that one of his students had ever written. Warren treated Milch as a wayward son, inviting him to visit his home and giving him career advice.

Milch also built a close relationship with the famed Yale critic R.W. B. Lewis, assisting him with his research on Lewis' Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Edith Wharton. All the while, Milch was searching for drugs and betting on horses and sports, while struggling to finish the novel praised by Warren.

The book looks back on Milch's abusive, reckless father, a surgeon also addicted to gambling who treated gangsters to pay off debts. Milch also was sexually abused as a young boy by a camp counselor. He used his chilhood traumas as material for his TV shows.

After Yale, Milch received a chance opportunity to write for Steven Bochco's ground-breaking NBC police drama "Hill Street Blues." Milch and Bochco then collaborated on the controversial crime saga "NYPD Blue," a smash for the network while drawing fire from conservatives because of its violence and explicit sexuality. A few flashes of nudity shook the foundations of network TV.

TV's gain was literature's loss; Milch never finished his novel. Yet characters like Dennis Franz's alcoholic detective Andy Sipowich in "NYPD Blue"  laid the foundation for HBO "quality TV" productions  like "The Wire" and "The Sopranos."

With a wife and family, Milch entered rehab, leading to his fascination with St. Paul's conversion to Christianity, his evangelistic career and New Testament writings, and his martyrdom in Rome.

Milch pitched HBO a show based on Paul's establishing the church throughout the Roman empire, but the cable network already had a show on ancient Rome in the works.

Seeing gold as analogous to St. Paul's world-changing symbol of Jesus' cross, Milch instead sold HBO on  the series"Deadwood," which explored  the rough life in the South Dakota boom town where the precious metal was discovered in the 1870s. It was famous as the place where "Wild Bill" Hickock was murdered, the subject of a powerful "Deadwood" episode.

"Deadwood," known for its vulgar dialogue, shocking violence and striking characters, was one of HBO's most memorable shows although it only lasted three years. Despite battling Alzheimer's, Milch completed the show with a movie-length conclusion.

"Life's Work" while often disjointed and egocentric tells a compelling story of redemption. After all of his destructive behavior, Milch achieves grace.

 

Andrea Barrett's "Natural History" revisits enthralling family saga

Andrea Barrett's "Natural History" rekindled my enchantment with fiction.

Barrett's collection of linked stories tells the histories of several interconnected families from the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the present.

"Natural History," published in 2022, extends the family saga she's examined in nine previous books, including the National Book Award-winning collection "Ship Fever." She's won the MacArthur "genius" award, and Guggenheim and NEA fellowships.

The characters live in Hammondsport, a village in central New York state's Finger Lakes region. Barrett is one of those writers who find universality in a small fictional place.

Barrett's predominantly female characters share a consuming interest in science and technology. Henrietta Atkins, a 19th century teacher and botanist who gives her students immersive lessons in insect and plant life, is the main character of the first stories in "Natural History," which follow her life from the American Civil War to after World War I.

Henrietta, who never marries and has a close friendship with another female scientist, Daphne Bannister, is an influential figure for generations of Hammondsport's children. She also plays a formative role in the lives of her nieces, Marion, Caroline and Elaine Cummings and their younger twin sisters, Agnes and Alice Cummings.

The book traces Henrietta's life from a child working for a local family through old age. Along with her teaching and scientific career in the village, she makes several momentous trips with Daphne, who becomes a famed author. 

How Henrietta inspires her nieces and students carries forth an intricate narrative of village life. Barrett gives each family member and acquaintance a distinctive personality.

Henrietta's childhood is haunted by a wounded Civil War veteran who returns to the village. One of her work duties was writing letters to him while he was away, and she was consumed by his returned letters describing camp life and different battles.

Later, she participates in the veteran's contributions to a regimental history, seeking to atone for accusations of its cowardice during the battle of Chancellorsville.

Her teaching gives the adventure of knowledge to several gifted students who go on to successful artistic and scientific careers. Henrietta's quiet life is full of intellectual and emotional excitement.

In the daring and adventuresome story "The Accident," her niece Caroline Cummings' career as an early aviation barnstormer takes center stage. 

Also appearing are a wealthy aristocratic family who owns a winery in the area, threatened by the passage of the Volstead Act in 1919. A family heir, Charles Durand, marries the lower class Alice Cummings, joining the two families.

Rose Marburg, the present-day central character of the concluding story that gives the book its title, is the granddaughter of Charles and Alice. Rose's life uncannily replicates that of her distant ancestor, Henrietta. Both love scientific exploration, writing and natural beauty. Each mourns brief, tragic love affairs, and unfulfilled careers.

Along with her impressive knowledge of American history and the country's golden age of inventions and intellectual discovery, Barrett gives lessons in cellular biology, botany and scientific literature.

Barrett's deeply imagined characters follow their destinies against the unfolding of history. Their small-town stories reflect that of the nation at large.

 

 

Douglas Brinkley, author of "Silent Spring Revolution," inspires Atlanta History Center audience to keep environmental flame burning

Historian Douglas Brinkley appeared at the Atlanta History Center Monday night to promote his new book on America's environmental accomplishments, speaking before an audience mainly composed of those who remembered the first Earth Day in 1970.

Sadly, that national event was the high point of the environmental progress detailed in Brinkley's comprehensive "Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and the Great Environmental Awakening."

A furious counterattack by American business, which saw environmental regulation as a socialistic threat to the free enterprise system, crushed the green movement.

Brinkley in his talk cited former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell's memo to the American Chamber of Commerce calling for right-wing capitalists to take action against a perceived liberal takeover of the media, academia, the judiciary and Congress.

That led to the rise of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Society and the Cato Institute and soaring campaign funding by the Koch Brothers and other wealthy business leaders.

Brinkley cited Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt for leading the first environmental wave, establishing national parks and preserving wilderness areas.

The movement gained momentum under the leadership of liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, the major environmental mentor to the Kennedy family. Douglas influenced John F. Kennedy to author national seashore legislation when Kennedy was a U.S. senator.

Kennedy as president continued his environmental activism. After Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson stepped up the preservation of wilderness areas. Brinkley credited first lady Lady Bird Johnson for her environmental leadership during Johnson's administration, tragically ruined by his support of the Vietnam War.

President Richard Nixon, a reluctant environmentalist, compiled an impressive environmental record. After the devastating Santa Barbara oil spill pf 1969 in the early days of his presidency, Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, which required environmental impact statements for construction projects, and established the Environmental Protection Agency, which banned the use of DDT.

Rachel Carson, whose monumental book "Silent Spring" in 1962 drew attention to the threat of DDT and other pesticides to animals and humans, was the main hero of Brinkley's talk.

Suffering from from the breast cancer that killed her in 1964, Carson was severely attacked by chemical companies until government scientists under President Kennedy confirmed the truth of her findings.

Before "Silent Spring," Carson wrote a pioneering trilogy of books on sea life. The books, recently republished in one volume by the Library of America,  predicted the current threats to the ocean from plastic pollution and rising acidification.

Most of those in the audience appeared in their 60s and 70s, members of a generation that witnessed the excitement of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and its distressing demise after the massive corporate attacks, which are accelerating in today's Republican Party.

Brinkley, a professor at Rice University, expressed hope that a rising younger generation will launch a new environmental wave. He mentioned that his Generation Z students display an intense interest in combating climate change.

"Silent Spring Revolution" will  inform them about our generation accomplished, and let slip away. Its historical scope and optimism for the future will inspire them to not let it happen again.

 

Paying homage to Henry Adams at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington

During a weekend trip to Washington, D.C., I made a long-desired pilgrimage to the site of Henry Adams' home.

The Hay-Adams Hotel now stands at the Lafayette Square corner where Adams lived next to John Hay in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Adams, the great-grandson of President John Adams and grandson of President and U.S. Rep. John Quincy Adams, was best known during his lifetime as the author of the nine-volume "The History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison."

Hay's long career of governmental service included terms as President Lincoln's secretary and secretary of state under presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

We ate lunch at the Hay-Adams Hotel, at 16th and H streets, across Lafayette Square from the White House. The adjoining houses of Hay and Adams were demolished in 1927 for the hotel's construction.

The hotel's restaurant was packed with people in suits and dresses, who gave the air of conducting serious business. Several distinguished looking gentlemen upon leaving exchanged jokes with the middle-aged waiters, promising with handshakes to return soon. Our waiter showed us a photo of him  and Henry Kissinger.

Overhearing the German-flavored conversation of well-dressed young people at an adjoining table, I studied a photo on the wall of Hay and Adams' homes. 

Ever since I read Adams' autobiography "The Education of Henry Adams" as a young man, I've been fascinated with Adams' life. Adams' "Mount St. Michel and Chartres," a study of the medieval veneration of the Virgin Mary and what Adams saw as the 20th century's tragic turn to an obsessive belief in science, is also one of my favorite books.

Adams in "The Education of Henry Adams" laments that his classical education at Harvard ill-prepared him for the 20th century and its technological changes, which he called the rise of "the dynamo." He also felt that his life of writing and a political insider was superfluous compared with his great-grandfather and grandfather's service to the nation.

Unmentioned by Adams in his autobiography was the death of his wife, Marian "Clover" Adams, an aspiring photographer who committed suicide in 1885. She battled depression and felt overshadowed by Adams' eminence.

One day, I'll travel to Rock Creek Cemetery to stand at her grave and contemplate August St. Gaudens' eerie monument to her. Adams, who lived until 1918, commissioned the sculpture, which shows a bereaved woman wearing a shroud.

Adams' old Boston heritage connects with another famous St. Gaudens statue, the monument at Boston's Public Gardens to Robert Gould Shaw, who led the black 54th Massachusetts Regiment during the Civil War. Shaw and many of his troops were killed in an attack on Fort Wagner, S.C. on July 18, 1963.

Unlike Shaw and one of his brothers, Adams didn't fight in the Civil War, instead serving as secretary to his father, Charles, the U.S. ambassador to Britain, whose main task was keeping  the British from allying with the Confederacy.

In "The Education of Henry Adams," Adams gives an insightful account of the Civil War, observed from London and his service to his father.

The historic corner where Adams lived and carried out a busy social life hosting leading writers, scientists and politicians hasn't changed that much during the years.

Looking out the restaurant window at historic St. John's Church, Lafayette Square and the White House, I marveled that Henry must have enjoyed a similar view.

 

 

All of those books in a lifetime of reading

Whenever I finish a book, I wish I knew how many I've completed in a lifetime of reading.

A few books stand out: Kerry the Firedog, another early picture book about a truck delivering coal, Alice and Jerry's adventures revealing the wonders of language in my first grade class taught by Miss Coates, whom I still remember. The Golden Books, with their distinctive gold-leaf binding, opened a world of enchantment.

My youth was filled with the Hardy Boys, Chip Hilton and the Western novels of Zane Gray. Our mother took us for summertime visits to the air-conditioned bookmobile, where I checked out stacks of baseball, football, golf and boxing histories.

I also loved a series of biographies about famous Americans in their youths, such as "Ernie Pyle, Young Reporter." My favorites were lives of Lou Gehrig, Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin.

Carlos Baker's early biography of Ernest Hemingway stands out as one of the first "serious" books I finished. From there, I discovered Hemingway's novels and short stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and "Tender Is the Night," Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" and James Joyce's "The Dead." I also fell under the spell of J.D. Salinger's short stories and Glass Family saga and James Joyce's "The Dead."

William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" and short stories were a major touchstone of my reading life.

From my college years, I treasure the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volumes 1 and 2, to which I often return. For years, I consulted my college Webster's dictionary, although it lacked a few contemporary words. In recent years, I've gone to the Internet for definitions.

In college, I began a lifetime passion for the poems of Keats, Eliot and Donne and the poems and plays of Shakespeare.

Sometimes the titles on my bookshelves look like tombstones. I wonder why I'd ever acquired some of my more esoteric titles. Reading often seems futile these days. But it's as essential to me as breathing.

I'll keep reading until I finish my final book.

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Chattahoochee Review

The Chattahoochee Review began the careers of many acclaimed authors.

Founded by Lamar York in 1989 at what was then Chattahoochee Community College, now Georgia Perimeter College, the small but vital journal published early work by an impressive list of writers. The journal's short stories, poems, author interviews, book reviews and art set a high standard.

AJC book columnist Suzanne Van Atten reported Tuesday that the review has stopped publication, a victim of the covid pandemic and financial setbacks.

Countering that sad news, Van Atten announced that the Townsend Prize for the best fiction book published in Georgia will again be awarded after a two-year hiatus. The Atlanta Writers Club, which took over the prize from the Chattahoochee Review, will announce the winner in April.

On a personal note, I published two pieces in the Chattahoochee Review a number of years ago, a book review and a critical essay on the work of the late Atlanta poet Turner Cassity, who served for many years as Emory University's chief librarian.

The Chattahoochee Review was a literary beacon. Its demise is a loss for Atlanta as a literary center.

Poetry flowers during National Poetry Month

Another National Poetry Month is almost gone.

In April, publishers release new poetry books and publications heighten their attention to the genre all but ignored the rest of the year.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review recently devoted an entire issue to "poesy." The New York Times Sunday magazine now publishes a poem each week.

Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda Thursday proclaimed his love of poetry in lavishly praising new critical studies of the art by Guggenheim Foundation President and noted poet/critic Edward Hirsch and Johns Hopkins professor and formalist poet Brad Leithauser.

Both have been longtime leaders of the nation's poetry establishment. Hirsch in several books and a term as the nation's poet laureate has striven to raise poetry's popularity. Leithauser has spearheaded efforts to restore the use of traditional meter and form after years of "free verse" dominance.

Hirsch's "The Heart of American Poetry" is the latest entry in an increasingly prevalent format he pioneered: offering a selection of poems accompanied by brief explanations of each of them.

Leithauser's "Rhyme's Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry" joins a teeming collection of books on poetic technique. The title and subject echo the late John Hollander's small classic "Rhyme's Reasons."

Dirda cites Hirsch's inclusion of outsider works like Robert Johnson's song "Crossroads Blues (Take 2)" along with a variety of poems from across the American canon.

He commends Leithauser for unlocking poetic techniques for the general reader.

While I'm skeptical of the triumphalism of National Poetry Month, I'm marking the occasion with the long-awaited arrival of British writer Lucasta Miller's "Keats a Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph." 

Has I yearned to read the book when it was first published in Great Britain, and waited long months for its American appearance. At last, April brought the book's arrival, and I'm happily reading it each night.

After years of receding from mainstream literary culture, poetry returned to prominence after Sept. 11, 2001. Grieving Americans after the attack on the World Trade Center found solace in poems like W.H. Auden's "Sept. 1, 1939."  Readers are also turning to poetry after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, especially to work by Ukrainian writers.

Poetry lives whenever deeper human emotions must receive expression.

 

 

Farewell, Richard Howard, renowned poet, scholar and translator of Friench literature

I loved reading books on MARTA trains in my years working downtown at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In those 15-minute trips between Buckhead's Lenox Station and Five Points downtown, I finished many novels, histories, biographies and nonfiction works I might not have ever opened at home.

The train's soothing rhythm focused my concentration, enabling me to reach the end of blockbusters like Margaret MacMillan's "Paris 1919," her encyclopedic account of the Woodrow Wilson-led peace talks after World War I.

My favorite MARTA book, a daily reading joy for weeks, was Stendhal's "The Charterhouse of Parma," translated by Richard Howard. Howard renewed Stendhal's language while maintaining his classic rigor and brought alive the scenes and characters.

Howard, a renowned poet, essayist, editor and teacher as well as the translator of an array of French books, died Thursday at age 92 in his beloved Manhattan. He was another of those great minds who suffered the cruelty of dementia late in life.

The winner of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection "Untitled Subjects," Howard taught at Columbia, where as a student he was part of the postwar generation mentored by Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. Howard's classmates included John Hollander, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Gottilieb.

Howard was one of the last members of that era of predominantly Jewish New York intellectuals, accomplished in all of the literary vineyards. His death also marks the passing of a renowned generation of American poets, led by James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, Hollander, James Wright, W.S. Merwin and Anne Sexton.

Showing Howard's longevity, he was born three years before Sylvia Plath.

When I met Hollander at the Sewanee Writers Conference, he mentioned Howard as a literary model. Years ago at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, fellow workshop members who knew Howard fondly remembered his learning and kindness.

Like Wilbur, the foremost translator of Moliere, Howard's translations illuminated French literature for countless readers like me.

I found Howard's poetry too academic and mannered. But his "Charterhouse of Parma" was one of my most memorable reading experiences.