The heart of Go Down, Moses (1942) is “The Bear.” The most widely acclaimed story of the seven in the volume, “The Bear” has received a variety of interpretations. One critic has emphasized its New Testament spirit, others its romantic and transcendental character, and still others its primitivism and myth. The variety of critical response testifies to the story's density of meaning. It is a rich, original story treating of a universal issue; nevertheless, it is distinctly American. Lionel Trilling has placed it in the romantic, transcendental tradition of Cooper, Thoreau, and Melville, while Malcolm Cowley has associated it with the work of Mark Twain. In its pastoral spirit “The Bear” does seem related to Huck Finn; and, in its development of the wilderness theme, to Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. Yet because of the story's tendency to split into two parts—one part concerned with the wilderness, the other with the Negro—the structure of the story has seemed faulty and its meaning ambiguous. If “The Bear” is examined within the context of the other related stories of the Go Down, Moses volume, its meaning may be clarified.

When “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” first appeared in Esquire (August 1936), it attracted immediate attention. It was promptly reprinted (in Best American Short Stories of 1937) by Edward J. O'Brien, who, praising it in his preface, remarked: “Nothing is irrelevant. The artist's energy is rigidly controlled for his purpose.” Since then it has been anthologized many times, and now it is probably safe to say that, with the possible exception of “The Killers,” none of Hemingway's stories has enjoyed greater popularity than this one. Hemingway's own opinion was that it was “about as good as any” of his shorter works.

The later poetry of Jorge Carrera Andrade shares with other literary efforts of our time the anguished conviction that solitude is the ultimate reality of man's existence, but it is not dominated, as is so much contemporary literature, by a sense of despair or frustration. On the contrary, his poetry arouses in the reader a curiously mild regret at the human predicament, and, at the same time, a calm, resigned optimism. Carrera does not achieve his effect by merely juxtaposing contradictory ideas or attitudes; instead, he fuses disparate elements so as to transmute the components into a new and unified whole.

In parentheses, Beckett distinguishes between the artist and the writer; the artist seeks his text within himself, and the artisan translates it, transmits it to the world. To translate—in its more usual meaning, Dr. Johnson's “to change into another language retaining the sense”—has been Beckett's method of improving his own artisanat. In the very essay from which the quotation on translation is excerpted, Beckett rendered into English passages from Proust's texts, while waiting to “acquire” his own.