SOURCE: "Father and Son: A Conversation with Isamu Noguchi," in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 17, No. 1, Summer, 1990, pp. 13-33.

In the following essay, Hakutani outlines the careers of both Yone Noguchi and his son, sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-88), with whom Hakutani conducted an interview in December of 1986.

"Isamu Noguchi and the airplane," Buckminster Fuller writes, "were both born in the United States of America in the first decade of the twentieth century."¹ Noguchi* was born in Los Angeles to the Japanese immigrant poet Yone Noguchi and the American literary enthusiast Leonie Gilmour, a Bryn Mawr graduate, but the place where the future sculptor spent his early years, curiously enough, was a small town in northern Indiana. By 1918, when Noguchi was taken to Indiana, it was a notable center of literary production that had reared many popular as well as serious writers, including Lew Wallace of Ben Hur, James...