turning on local customs,
novels based on an isolated society, books of history and fiction going
back to provincial simplicity will go on being written and published.
But I do not believe it possible that a good one will henceforth come
from a mind that does not in outlook transcend the region on which it
is focused. That is not to imply that the processes of evolution have
brought all parts of the world into such interrelationships that a
writer cannot depict the manners and morals of a community up Owl Hoot
Creek without enmeshing them with the complexities of the Atlantic
Pact. Awareness of other times and other wheres, not insistence on that
awareness, is the requisite. James M. Barrie said that he could not
write a play until he got his people off on a kind of island, but had he
not known about the mainland he could never have delighted us with the
islanders--islanders, after all, for the night only. Patriotism of the
right kind is still a fine thing; but, despite all gulfs, canyons, and
curtains that separate nations, those nations and their provinces are
all increasingly interrelated.

No sharp line of time or space, like that separating one century from
another or the territory of one nation from that of another, can delimit
the boundaries of any region to which any regionalist lays claim.
Mastery, for instance, of certain locutions peculiar to the Southwest
will take their user to the Aztecs, to Spain, and to the border of
ballads and Sir Walter Scott's romances. I found that I could not
comprehend the coyote as animal hero of Pueblo and Plains Indians apart
from the Reynard of Aesop and Chaucer.

In a noble opinion respecting censorship and freedom of the press,
handed down on March 18, 1949, Judge Curtis Bok of Pennsylvania said:

It is no longer possible that free speech be guaranteed Federally and
denied locally; under modern methods of instantaneous communication
such a discrepancy makes no sense.... What is said in Pennsylvania may
clarify an issue in California, and what is suppressed in California may
leave us the worse in Pennsylvania. Unless a restriction on free speech
be of national validity, it can no longer have any local validity
whatever.

Among the qualities that any good regional writer has in common with
other good writers of all places and times is intellectual integrity.
Having it does not obligate him to speak out on all issues or, indeed,
on any issue. He alone is to judge whether