Author, Staff

Speer Morgan

Editor

Speer Morgan (Ph.D, Stanford University) has been associated with the Missouri Review from its inception, and has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Missouri Review since 1979.  A professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia since 1972, Morgan is among the most respected editors in literary publishing.  As the editor of the Missouri Review, he has been responsible for co-administrating grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, the Missouri Arts Council, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, and the City of Columbia Office of Cultural Affairs. In 1985, he created the Missouri Review Trust, the journal’s endowment, which is currently the focus of a major fundraising effort. The author of five novels and a collection of short stories and the editor of three other books, he’s a past recipient of an NEA Fellowship for Fiction and the recipient of an American Book Award for The Freshour Cylinders, a novel published in 1998.

CONTRIBUTIONS

34.2 Cover. Cover Art: Contemporary Romeo by Alexandros Vasmoulakis.

Foreword

Jul 17 2011

Significant Other

I sometimes wonder why the best literature so often has a element of unlikelihood: why one of the great novels of the twentieth century is an 800-page description of an ad salesman and a student walking around one day in Dublin; or why one of the defining American classics is about living in a shack on a lake for a couple of years; or why one of the finest English lyric poems is a depiction of an antique urn in a museum. Why is the most memorable stuff so often the miraculous transformation of a seemingly limited subject?

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Foreword

Sep 01 2010

The Shadow

While Jung gave a name to an amoral and potentially “dark” side of the mind, the idea is of course as old as dragons, devils and demons. The pulp fiction, comic-book series and radio show The Shadow became an often-imitated model for popular dramatizations of “what evil lurks in the hearts of men” and the trickster figure who fights against it. Several of the contributors to this issue explore different corners of the dark or destructive forces in human nature.

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Foreword

Jun 01 2010

Crash

The differences between generations-the Lost Generation, the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Generations X, Y and Z (where do we go next?)-is a popular subject full of questionable simplifications. Sweeping statements about age groups in different eras are at best elusive, due to both sudden changes in history and the diversity at any given time among locales, classes, ethnicities and personalities. Lately one of the often discussed issues concerning the Millennial Generation is whether they suffer from hyper-parenting, with their perennially in-touch parents not giving them enough freedom to develop independence. They need to actually be allowed to make a few mistakes, the argument goes, in order to be inoculated against what to avoid.

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Found Text

Jun 01 2010

Pulling Pranks: James Stern's Reminiscences of an Edwardian Childhood

James Stern never achieved literary celebrity. His books were few, his letters many and his memoir unfinished, yet what he wrote was the stuff of life-the beauty and tragedy of humanity. His memoir, “the problem book,” was not fashioned into a comprehensive work; what we show you from the Stern collection of the British Library are recollections that capture the adventure of childhood set against the backdrop of a mythical time and rarefied place.

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Foreword

Dec 01 2009

The Questionable Past

In the company of old friends, what surprises me is not forgetting shared experiences or remembering them slightly differently but the fact that we have anything like the same memories. Perhaps that is a simple confession of aging. Yet psychologists have grown increasingly skeptical about the human ability to remember and accurately recount the distant past, just as historiographers are dubious about our understanding of history. This declining faith in our grasp of “what really happened” has taken a particularly dramatic dive over the past century.

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Foreword

Sep 01 2009

Demons

Cheever’s life suggests how often not just writers but most of us suffer from demons. Whether or not they are as dramatic as Cheever’s, they can be both commonplace and cumbersome in our lives. The modern word “demon” comes from a proto-European term for “god” or “celestial,” yet its different usages over time refer to a variety of hidden powers or forces, from the higher self of Greek philosophy to the destructive demons of medieval Christianity. For Freud, demons were impulses arising from repression. Modern philosophers use the term “Morton’s demon” to describe our surprisingly frequent tendency not to see what belies our currently held biases.

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Art

Jun 01 2008

Norman Bel Geddes: A Modernist da Vinci

In 1929 American theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes drafted “Airliner Number 4,” a plan for a nine-deck amphibian airliner with areas for deck games, shops and salons, an orchestra, a gymnasium and a solarium. He calculated that twenty engines would be needed to achieve cruising altitude. In Horizons (1932), a book on American streamlined design and urban planning, he carefully detailed the airliner’s projected fl ying time and fuel usage, along with the cost of building, equipping, furnishing and operating the plane. To fi nancial backers, the design seemed innovative but extravagant, and it was never built. [2008]

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Foreword

Jun 01 2008

Agonists

Sisyphus is a mythical example of one agile enough to defy fate, at least for a while. He is frequently thought to be an archetype of hopelessness and the futility of life because he was ultimately condemned to an eternity of pushing the rock up the hill and watching it roll down again. Yet Sisyphus was a powerful rogue, the founder of a city, successful in love with mortals and immortals, capable of talking his way out of trouble with angry gods and once even out of Hades. A destiny of ongoing effort for such a resolute heavy hitter seems a natural fate-and also not a bad deal.

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Found Text

Dec 01 2007

Laurence Olivier's Letters to Young Actors

Laurence Olivier never wanted to be a matinee idol or a leading man who played only romantic heroes. Yet after back-to-back performances in Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and Pride and Prejudice in 1939-1940, he was sought after by producers and directors, celebrity magazines and ardent fans. His early roles were classic literary characters. A New York Times reviewer called his portrayal of Heathcliff a case of “a player physically and emotionally ordained for a role.” He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for both Wuthering Heights and Rebecca. Hollywood was sending a rare message: “We want more.”

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Foreword

Dec 01 2007

Fractured

In one of his many helpful letters of advice sent to young actors — published for the first time in this issue — Laurence Olivier describes the essence of a Shakespearean tragic character as a “perfect statue of a man,” made vulnerable by a significant flaw that finally will destroy him. Olivier’s remark calls to mind a quality of literature and indeed of all the arts: they relate to the core of an individual, the human, not the “statue,” and they articulate danger. The masks of literature, like those of primitive art and ritual, suggest “the other” that lies below the social being — the primal conflicts, the animal, and the sometimes scary forces within us.

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Foreword

Dec 01 2006

What a Writer Does Best

The full text of this foreword is not currently available online.

One winter evening many years ago, some friends and I were entertaining ourselves with a game of free association. We were to respond without hesitation to whatever word or phrase the questioner put to us. Instead about asking about the obvious things– favorite hobbies, best moview, happiest moments, etc.– my friend was being philosophical. To me he said, “Literature,” and my unthinking response was, “Black and white.”

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Foreword

Sep 01 2005

Losing It

We sometimes assume that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a time when thinkers became sensitized to the struggle and uncertainty of nature and life. It truly was one of the most creative and turbulent periods in the history of thought. Darwin, Marx, Freud and Einstein all depicted not just conflict but systems of disparity between what seems to be and what is. In literature as well as the sciences both the obvious and the hidden struggles of life were being looked at with new intimacy and understanding.

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Foreword

Jun 01 1993

Foreword

If you think the streets are sordid and unsafe in 1993, read Timothy Gilfoyle’s recent book City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920. It describes in stunning detail the sex-and crim-saturated streets of New York, particularly during the nineteenth centruy. In this issue, Professor Gilfoyle edits a memoir by George Appo, pickpocket, “green-good” con artist, and opium addict during one of the earliest American drug scenes.

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Found Text

Dec 01 1992

The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Book of Jubilees

1:27 Then he told the angel of the presence to dictate to Moses from the beginning of the creation until my sanctuary is built among them for all the ages of eternity. 1:28 The Lord will appear in the site of all, and all will know that I am the God of Israel, father of all Jacob’s children, and king on Mt. Zion for all the ages of eternity. Then Zion and Jerusalem will be holy. 1:29 The angel of the presence, who was going along in front of the Israelite camp, took the tablets (which told) of the divisions of the years from the time the law and the testimony were createdÑ for the weeks of their jubilees, year by year in their full number, and their jubilees from the time of the creation until the time of the new creation when the heavens, the earth, and all their creatures will be renewed like the powers of the sky and like all the creatures of the earth, until the time when the temple of the Lord will be created in Jerusalem on Mt. Zion. All the luminaries will be renewed for (the purposes of) healing, health, and blessing for all the elect ones of Israel and so that it may remain this way from that time throughout all the days of the earth.

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History as Literature

Sep 01 1992

The Spanish American War Journal of Amy Wingreen

I have come to care for the sick on the transport and also have in my charge a very sick nurse. She was ill on the boat going to Cuba and has been ever since, and if she ever gets home alive she will do well. I have not been on deck at all, and not a tinge of seasickness, though the boat has tossed a good deal. The things in our state room slip and slide around, and I after them. I look out now and then and catch a glimpse of the sweeping sea and smell the ocean air and long for a billow to spray me. My prayer was, when I was so ill at Siboney, that I might rather be buried at sea, but better still, that I might be privileged to land on American soil again.

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Foreword

Mar 01 1992

Foreword

In the Peter Weir film Dead Poets’ Society Robin Williams plays prep-school teacher John Keating, whose theatrical talents and fresh attitude inspire his students to think for themselves. During their first class discussion of poetry, Keating tears out the introduction to the “J. Evans Prichard” textbook. Later, he stands on his desk and encourages each of his students to do likewise to “get a different perspective.” Keating’s popularity inspires a small group from his class to look through an old yearbook, where they discover their teacher’s affiliation with the “Dead Poets’ Society” when he was a student, and they proceed to recreate the society, gathering to read poetry in a cave not far from the school. While physically not distant, the cave is an exotic place for these teenagers, where they are carried out of their world into the eternal time of poetry.

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Foreword

Sep 01 1988

Foreword

It is a curious fact that in an age so dominated by the products of science and technology, there is a relatively low level of interest in the subject. As recently as twenty years ago, science-writing staffs hardly existed among newspapers. Even the largest newspapers have taken on science staffs only within the last few years. Before 1984, there were only nineteen newspapers in the country that had weekly science sections, mostly dedicated to health and medicine although that number increased to sixty-six within two years. The controversies over AIDS and the increased public interest in preventive health contributed to this expansion, making health overwhelmingly the area of highest growth. Serious coverage of the non-health sciences remains at surprisingly low levels. Relatively few nonmetropolitan newspapers have science staffs; therefore, what few stories they run are off the wire. This makes for great blank spaces in the country, where local scientific and tecnological issues are virtually ignored by the press.