Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Phillips, Robert (Schaeffer) - Robert Emmet Long

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ROBERT EMMET LONG

[The Land of Lost Content] comprises fifteen related stories about present or former inhabitants of Public Landing, an Eastern Shore community some 100 miles below the Mason-Dixon line and apparently based on Phillips's boyhood home in Sussex County, Delaware. A prologue called "The Happy Highway" introduces us to the area: the dreary stretches of flat, sandy fields and chicken farms; the crumbling colonial estates along the highway that have been converted into neon-lighted "fudge palaces"; the revival camp on the outskirts of town; the Baptist Church with its spire surmounted by an angel, lavishly illuminated at night; the fertilizer plant of "Mr. Sam," a local tycoon vigilant in keeping new industry out and wages down; the Bijou theater, with its balcony divided down the middle by a plywood wall—one half for white patrons, the other for blacks. It also appears that Public Landing has a scandalously high rate of alcoholism. Bleak as this...

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1. Introduction
2. William Van O'Connor
3. Andrew Curry
4. Robert Emmet Long
5. L. S. Dembo
6. Joyce Carol Oates
7. Jerome Mazzaro
8. Alan Williamson
9. James Finn Cotter
10. G. E. Murray
11. David Sanders
12. Copyright

1. Joyce Carol Oates