1951 Year

It was a different time in baseball, a time when players did not move from one team to another, one season after another. Good teams stayed together, year-in and year-out, almost in perpetuity. There would be an occasional trade here or there, but if a team put together a contender, it would be a contender for years. And in those days, Brooklyn had a contender. Piece by piece, the Dodgers came together, eventually assembling a lineup with no easy outs.

The forest is cloaked in mist, a chilling gray that drifts through the mossy tangle of limbs. It is barely dawn, but Ronald Yechout is wide awake, recounting the day he stumbled across the Fall Creek salmon massacre. "Here," says Yechout, striding across a narrow bridge. One day in November 1998, Yechout stopped at Fall Creek while elk hunting to admire the annual return of coho salmon from the ocean. "The river was full of fish, absolutely crawling with them," he says.

Anthony Burgess, who was no mean judge of his peers, declared roundly that Angus Wilson was a superior novelist to Graham Greene. Both writers died in 1991, and the contrast between their reputations could not have been crueler. Greene was reprinted and treated with awe as a popular idol right up to the end. Wilson was almost totally forgotten.

Daunting as it may be to assemble a centuries-spanning assessment of any country, even one with a fairly linear march through history, how does one approach a culture as unstable, contradictory and contested as ours? Where do you start? Where do you stop? And how, exactly, do you know when you're done? That was the task faced by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, editors of the gargantuan "A New Literary History of America" (Harvard University Press: 1,096 pp., $49.95). By their reckoning, "new" means as recent as Barack Obama; "literary" means anything from Emily Dickinson's poetry to hip-hop's wild style; and "America" means the United States, not the two continents that stretch across a hemisphere.

ART BUCHWALD, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political satirist, columnist and author of more than 30 books who built deceptively simple spoofs of modern life on foundations of indignation, has died. He was 81. Buchwald, who had seemed to literally laugh in the face of death over the last year, succumbed to kidney failure Wednesday while surrounded by family members at his home in Washington, D.C., according to his son, Joel.

"I need to know who I am, where I come from." It was Memorial Day 1997, and Edward Lee was sitting on a worn sofa in a worn house in Jackson. He was talking to an old man with a raspy drawl and a pacemaker--his grandfather, Edgar Lee. They hadn't seen each other in three years. Edward Lee had been living in California and Texas and had lost touch with most of his relatives. They had left Mississippi long ago, scattered north and west. He was 35 now, separated from his wife.