Reviews for Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation: Letters, 1935-1955

The average rating for Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation: Letters, 1935-1955 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-02-23 00:00:00 Charles D. Spar A great read! Kees was quite a letter writer, and I'm really curious now about all of the letters that were not included in this volume. I've been so curious about him for a long time. He began as a poet and short story writer, worked as a librarian in order to live, became a critic and screenplay writer for documentaries, as well as a photographer, artist (painter & collages). He also played jazz piano, and wrote a number of provocative reviews about some of the early jazz musicians well before it became the popular thing to do. He was also something of an entrepreneur in the arts, putting on shows, collaborating with his peers. And then, he disappeared in 1955, when he was 40 or 41. No one knows what really happened. His car was found with the keys still in it at one end of the Golden Gate bridge. However, he had also talked about going to Mexico or traveling... Kees was truly an artist of his time, but more like a bellwether. He was nearly always the first one at the "party," even though he did not strictly belong to any particular group or school. Yet, he was very influential and his reputation is still coming into its own.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-23 00:00:00 Phillip Wesholowski Not just a supplement to James Reidel's Weldon Kees bio, VANISHED ACT, this is a must-read for fans of this multitalented writer. Knoll does a good job of linking Kees' letters with biographical information and other material. I wish Kees hadn't stopped writing short stories in favor of reviews--unlike Knoll, I don't consider criticism to be his metier--but one need not agree with Knoll on all such matters to find this book fascinating, and sometimes disturbing, as when Knoll juxtaposes a hallucinatory letter, about visions of menacing dogs, by Kees' wife with Kees' similarly themed poem, "The Contours of Fixation". Knoll makes a case for Kees being just slightly ahead of major cultural trends of his era, while refusing to join any clique, since as Kees himself wrote, "Plurality is all." I don't normally read collections of letters by writers--curling up with WE DREAM OF HONOUR: JOHN BERRYMAN'S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER is my idea of hell--but there's an exception to every rule....