A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing. Samuel Butler the Younger, Life and Habit Reader who…
Corn grows in my father’s backyard garden
in ten green files, each row a week taller,
the tallest now past two months, nearly ripe.
The years he’s planted gardens range beyond
the year that I was born in early spring,
but memory recalls three different plots
Not many years after Voltaire delivered himself of his much maligned observation that history is a pack of tricks we play on the dead, historians began to attempt to prove him wrong by telling us…
Dudley Dean is a forty-year-old befuddled jack-Mormon professor of English. Wife Hannah has left him and married one of his teaching colleagues—a maudlin, oversexed boor named Ashton—and his devout Mormon mother has just died. Dudley…
Readers of Dialogue who have been searching for a sympathetic, read able, and reasonably accurate introduction to Mormonism to present to their non-Mormon friends may well consider Carl Carmer’s The Farm Boy and the Angel.…
So Stevenson be glad—
Whatever your life was, your dreams were,
I do not know and you cannot care,
Fallen like a stone on that hot street.
Adlai Stevenson died in Palermo.
In the airport. His face was pasted
On the newsstand, bobbing in and out among
Jabbering Sicilians, their sweaty hands
Sticky with orange soda pop,
His eyes milky, intensely blue,
Fasten totally upon the life that was living
From 1884 to nineteen hundred and twelve;
Not seeing the life that has been his dying since,
Though he has braked the crawl toward surcease
More courageously successful than we (even I, the Valley’s Poet)
In our existing.
In his writing lifetime, David L. Wright, a brilliant young author from southern Idaho, did come to know some measure of fame after the publica tion of his short story “A Summer in the Country,”…