Includes 33 previously uncollected pieces -- one story, one poem, numerous speeches, interviews, essays, reviews, and unfinished drafts -- which address variously the issues of women's rights; the history and future of Southern, American, and modernist literatures; the responsibilities of writer and critic; and the future of humanist values in a "machine civilization", a "time of general disintegration, when stupidity, cruelty, vulgarity and mere empty violence are all glorified in our fiction."--JSTOR.