SOURCE: 'The Novels of Robert P. Tristram Coffin," in Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. VII, No. 4, December 1965, pp. 151-61.

In the following essay, MacKay examines the theme of permanence running through each of Coffin's three novels and judges it is most effectively expressed in his first.

Robert P. Tristram Coffin was a poet who turned frequently to prose; indeed, there was almost no area of prose he did not attempt—biographies, an autobiography,collected lectures, essays, history, criticism, short stories, and novels. This report shall confine itself to the lastmentioned, for (poetry naturally excluded) the novels offered Coffin his greatest challenge.

Coffin's three novels were all written within the seven-year period from 1935 to 1941, when some of his best work as a poet was being done. The first novel, Red Sky in the Morning, was published just a year before the author won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize for poetry; the second...