Summary
IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN by William Carlos Williams, introduction by Rick Moody, afterword by Horace Gregory; New Directions, 246 pages ($13.95 paper).
Most decent white people in 2009 have trouble merely hitting the letters on a keyboard. So we call it "The N Word" now, not quite dealing with the fact that, at so many archaic points in the past 200 years, it was freely -- yes, recklessly -- used by the white writers most inclined to be racially sympathetic, even egalitarian. The word freely festoons literary masterworks, from Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad to poems by Wallace Stevens.See the full content of this document
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