THIS ANTHOLOGY IS COMPOSED OF STORIES, poems, and critical essays of-
fered for the John Peale Bishop Memorial Literary Prize Contest con-
ducted between April 1 and September 15, 1945, by The Sewanee Re-
view and Prentice-Hall, Inc. The prizes were awarded as follows: $200
to Andrew Lytle for his story, THE GUIDE; $200 to Malcolm Cowley
for his essay, WILLIAM FAULKNER'S LEGEND OF THE
SOUTH; and $100 to Randall Jarrell for his poem, THE MARCHEN.
The judges were Gorham Munson, Editor of the Trade Book Depart-
ment of Prentice-Hall, Inc., and myself, who at the time of the contest
was Editor of The Sewanee Review. The winning titles and a few
others which are acknowledged elsewhere in this volume, were pub-
lished in The Sewanee Review. Under the conditions of the contest
non-Southern writers were invited to compete for the essay prize, pro-
vided their subjects were Southern; the entrants for the fiction and
poetry prizes had to be of Southern birth or identified with the South-
ern States by residence or by interest.

Mr. Munson and I deemed it highly appropriate that the contest be
held in memory of John Peale Bishop, a Southern writer of great dis-
tinction whose literary life spanned almost exactly the period between
the two great wars. Bishop was born on April 21, 1892, in Charles Town,
Jefferson County, West Virginia, one of the "lost counties" of Virginia;
he died on April 4, 1944 at Hyannis, Massachusetts. Elsewhere I have
written a personal memoir and I will not repeat it here. Bishop's value
for the Southern writer of the coming generation must first of all lie
in his value for the imaginative life wherever he is read; without a
certain universal interest we should not expect for his work even a
sectional attention. More than any Southerner of his time he was aware
of the South in relation to Europe and the North, and the tension of

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