Contemporary Literary Criticism


Waters, Frank | John Milton (essay date Autumn 1977)

John Milton (essay date Autumn 1977)

SOURCE: "The Sound of Space," in The South Dakota Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, Autumn, 1977, pp. 11-15.

[Milton is an American educator, poet, biographer, novelist, and historian who edits The South Dakota Review. In 1964 he conducted a series of televised interviews with Waters and published them in 1971 as Conversations with Frank Waters. In the essay below, Milton focuses on Waters's interest in the unity of man and his world—a unity, he asserts, that transcends time, space, form, and culture.]

Of the three writers whom I consider to be the most important Western American novelists—Walter Clark, Frank Waters, and Harvey Fergusson—Waters is the most involved in form as space (or, space as form), Fergusson relies most heavily upon temporal form, and Clark is somewhere between the two. In Western literature we are perhaps more accustomed to the linear development of events than to a...

[The entire page is 2104 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

Lookup any word on eNotes with our dictionary. Highlight the word and press SHIFT + D for a definition, or SHIFT + T for a synonym.