Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

By far the most ambitious of Caroline Gordon's novels, None Shall Look Back is a story of the Civil War which at first gives promise of outdistancing its numerous competitors. Miss Gordon, it is obvious at once, has many assets in her favor. Her style is distinguished—vastly superior, for example, to Margaret Mitchell's; in the clarity and...