Book details

The Old Glory

Endecott and the Red Cross; My Kinsman, Major Molineux; and Benito Cereno

Author: Robert Lowell: Introduction by Robert Brustein; Director's Notes by Jonathan Miller

The Old Glory

The Old Glory

$21.00

Trade Paperback

About This Book

Winner of Five Obies, now back in print after fifteen years, a stage adaptation of classic stories by Hawthorne and Melville

In the three plays in The Old Glory--Endecott and the Red Cross;...

Page Count
208
On Sale
08/15/2000

Book Details

Winner of Five Obies, now back in print after fifteen years, a stage adaptation of classic stories by Hawthorne and Melville

In the three plays in The Old Glory--Endecott and the Red Cross; My Kinsman, Major Molineux; and Benito Cereno--the most powerful figure in postwar American poetry confronts the most haunting American fiction writers of the nineteenth century. The result is a mythical, nightmare history of three centuries in America. In Endecott and the Red Cross, Hawthorne's Puritan governor, horrified by his colony's high living, declares, "Everything in America will be Bible, blood and iron. / England will no longer exist." The other two plays, based on Hawthorne's My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Melville's Benito Cereno, take up the themes of parricide and independence: one in Boston on the eve of the Revolutionary War, the other on a merchant ship in the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century.

The plays were first performed in 1964, when the poet Randall Jarrell wrote: "I have never seen a better American play than Benito Cereno, the major play in Robert Lowell's The Old Glory . . . The play is a masterpiece of imaginative knowledge."

Imprint Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN

9780374527044

In The News

“No other English or American poet of his generation has, in his handling of language, the same sheer brute strength; no other poet is so deeply moved not only by moral but by physical horror and disgust.” —G. S. Fraser, The New York Times Book Review

About the Creators

The Old Glory

The Old Glory

$21.00

Trade Paperback