The village of Damariscotta Mills looked as though it had been scrubbed and polished, so bright was the light, so transparent the air, on the July afternoon when a taxi left us at a white clapboard house with green shutters, the home of Jean Stafford and Robert Lowell. Though we were not late, Cal (as he was called) greeted us as if he had been impatient for our arrival. 

I was almost fifteen. I was working at my first real job at a place called the Spudnut Shop, a doughnut store, in Union Gap, Washington, June of 1955. This very good looking young man walked in with

I don’t know what had roused cummings’s ire; he was fairly well represented in Untermeyer’s anthologies.

There was a Rembrandt drawing of a lion above Sabina’s bed. When Francesca sleeps there, the lion looks down on Rose White and Briar Rose Slumbering, or some such scene by Burne-Jones. By day the Rembrandt lion

La Consula was a big white house with Doric columns along the front. It sat in a park on the road between Churriana and Alhaurin de la Torre, near the Malaga airport

Terry Southern’s interview with the English novelist Henry Green (born Henry Yorke) has been an in-house favorite atThe Paris Review ever since it appeared in our nineteenth issue (Summer 1958). If Green was, in Southern’s borrowed description, a “writer’s writer’s writer,” theirs is an interviewer’s interview

As we stroked Terry’s forehead and held his hand, he would casually remove the mask as if about to shave or sleep. Before his oxygenation level fell below 69, I would gently hold the mask before his nose, careful not to let it chafe and crimp him.

“You’ve got to keep the mask on,” my mother Carol said, “it’s what’s keeping you alive.”

Part I: Texas.    Born in the small cotton-farming town of Alvarado, 1924. My dad, a pharmacist and descendant of the notorious “Indian lover” and first prez of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston. Around high-school age moved to Fort Worth and Dallas. Attended Sunset High School, learned how to get girls drunk on the original Grayhound — grapefruit juice masking the taste of vod — followed by the adroit and surreptitious use of sharpened rounded-point kindergarten scissors to snip away that last bastion of defense, the panty crotch panel. 

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.