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Our turkey was ruined because our meat thermometer was broken, but everyone liked the default vegetarian dinner and something's been salvaged for soup.

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Wilbur: One evening in the late 1940's I asked Frost whether he was fond of Beddoes, and he said he was; but he said so with what seemed to be a warning glitter in his eye, and I did not pursue the subject.

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Father situations for deceased Am. Lit. luminaries, based on cursory glances + my often scant prior knowledge:

Dead (before the writer reached puberty) and/or alcoholic fathers for Hawthorne, Melville, James, Twain, Faulkner, Ellison, for Emerson (& obviously William James), for Whitman, Poe, Stephen Crane, Robinson, Frost, Moore, Bishop, for O'Neill and Williams, maybe for Hemingway(?). Apparently largely absent fathers for Porter, Hart Crane and Merrill. O'Connor's had the lupus, Dreiser's was a religious nut. Those of Thoreau, Dickinson, Wharton, Cather, Stevens, Eliot, Fitzgerald, West and Welty seem to have been around and more or less sane & sober--though Dickinson does speak of her father as too deep in his Briefs to pay attention to anything his children might do. So that's about a 3 to 1 margin for obviously major father/fatherlessness problems during childhood. Not sure how far any of that departs from population norms for those several generations.

I find that first run, of our six (probably) most acclaimed novelists, to be the most fascinating: dead fathers for all but James and Faulkner, whose fathers were known to be not just drunks but very critical and sarcastic ones.