He did so through a hugely popular comic strip called "Pogo" and through the dozens of books in which the stories he told were recycled and granted a somewhat more permanent existence. In 1936 the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge was established, with nearly half a million acres of pristine freshwater swampland, but it is no exaggeration to say that it was Walt Kelly who really put Okefenokee on the map, made it a part of the national consciousness. Okefenokee had been on the map for ages, though little known outside Georgia. It was an actual place, the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia, but in the hands of an amazingly gifted man named Walt Kelly it had been transformed into a universe all its own, a microcosm of America populated by a vast cast of wild, crazy, goofy, fantastic and utterly lovable characters. But when I was young - too young to understand Faulkner, for sure - another southern place a few hundred miles to the east seemed to me at once the most magical and believable in all America. An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.įor many years it has been my passionate conviction that the greatest monument of American literature is Yoknapatawpha, the fictional Mississippi county created by William Faulkner in which all his greatest novels and short stories are set.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2023
Categories |