T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History Collection
ABSTRACT
INTERVIEWEE NAME: Donald Stanford # 4700.0124
IDENTIFICATION:[2/7/1913 - ]; former editor of the Southern
Review
INTERVIEWER: Pamela Dean
PROJECT: LSU History
DATE: 5/15/92 FOCUS DATES: 1953-85
ABSTRACT:
Tape 172
Family history; early education at Stanford and College of the
Pacific; influence of Yvor Winters and Winter's wife, Janet Lewis;
inspiration for his works and his style; M.A. from Harvard, 1934;
correspondence with Vassar student-poet, Elizabeth Bishop; post-graduate work at Stanford University because of the Depression;
early teaching experiences; navigation instructor for Air Corp
during WW II in Brazil; LSU instructor teaching foreign students in
English, 1949-1950; reasons for choosing LSU; Ph.D. from Stanford
University with dissertation on poet Edward Taylor; meeting and
marriage to Maryanna Peterson; return to LSU in 1953; internal
political process for reviving the Southern Review with support of
Otis Wheeler, Thomas Kirby, John Hunter, Max Goodrich, and Pete
Taylor; reasons for Lewis Simpson and Donald Stanford as co-editors; contributions of Pat Roberson and Rima Reck in magazine
start-up; conflict between Simpson and Stanfored over journal's
emphasis--southern or international; continuity achieved from
production of old Review and new Review with original contributors;
meeting with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in November,
1963; local support as the cause of high circulation; well-known
contributors, Allen Tate, Eudora Welty, Glenway Westcott, and Mary
McCarthy, and promising young writers, Rene Wellek, Malcolm Cowley,
Matthew Josephson, and N. Scott Momaday; formalist and free verse
poetry forms; success of special issues; strong support of
administration for the Southern Review; financial independence of
the Southern Review from the University Press; independence of both
editors in inclusion of commissioned materials; stability of
literary quarterlies; renaissance of Southern culture leading to
elite literature; creation of LSU "formalists," a group of devotees
of formal verse poetry, and their contributions to the Southern
Review.
TAPES: T 172 TOTAL PLAYING TIME: 50 minutes
# PAGES TRANSCRIPT: 29
RESTRICTIONS: none