“All my life‚” says CARL SANDBURG, ”I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write. . . . At fifty, there was puzzlement as to whether I was a poet, a biographer, a wandering troubadour with a guitar, a Midwest Hans Christian Andersen, or a historian of current events.”Now, at seventy-two, Mr. Sandburg’s Complete Poems are to be published by Harcourt‚ Brace‚ and as he looked back over the long, dear toil of those poems, he wrote this essay as the preface for his new book.

WILLIAM L. COPITHORNE taught English in a Havana preparatory school after his graduation from Harvard, and more recently at the University of Havana. He spent most of the war in Newfoundland in cryptographic work for the United States Army, and he is now on the faculty of Kenyon College, where he teaches Creative Writing. His “Morning Musicale” appeared in the Accent on Living pages of the April, 1946, Atlantic.

Professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Center at Stanford ,Wallace Slegner is widely known for his novels and short stories and for his encouragement to young authors. He has twice been a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and three of his short stories hare been awarded O. Henry prizes. He heve recalls an unforgettable aspect of Saskatchewan, where he spent five years of his childhood in a small frontier town.

WINONA MCCLINTIC was a radioman second class in the United States Navy during World War II and the Korean War. She graduated from Mills College, contributed poems to the Atlantic, and was at work on her Ph.D. (under the G.I. Bill) when matrimony intervened. She married an engineer and while he, she says, “fiddles with things on airplanes,” she finds time to raise guinea frigs and write.

One of the top-ranking journalists of New York, GEOFFREY PARSONShas been the chief editorial writer of the New York Herald Tribune since 1924. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1942. The author of two books and an omnivorous reader, he here attempts that most difficult of tasks: the recommending to an American audience of an English author whom we have long neglected.