Harry outdid himself in spring 2005 with the Robert Penn Warren Centennial English Graduate Symposium. And that’s saying something, given his distinguished record in organizing this annual event, from the very first one in 1989, honoring the keynote speaker Irving Howe; to the second in 1990, which featured the world premiere of Brian Edgar’s award-winning film of Hemingway’s “Indian Camp”; to the fifth in 1993, which brought Gay Talese and Floyd Patterson to campus to speak about sports and literature; to the ninth in 1997 on the deus loci in literature, whose guest scholar was the Lawrence Durrell biographer, Ian MacNiven; to the eleventh in 1999 commemorating the Ernest Hemingway Centennial with a two-day event that culminated in an address by Valerie Hemingway and a panel discussion with seven major Hemingway scholars from universities across the United States.

But the seventeenth symposium was special—not to say extravagant—even by the standards his previous symposia had set. How better to describe it than in Harry’s own words: “Two keynote speakers, three visiting scholar-panelists, and nine New Paltz graduate students gave presentations at the academic sessions on May 3. The opening program was the ‘Homage to RPW Poetry Reading’ on May 2, an extraordinary event at which seventeen poets and writers read tributes to Warren. A total of twenty-four speakers participated in the symposium programs, including twelve visiting speakers and readers who came from afar to celebrate the Warren Centennial.” Among those twelve visiting speakers were Chinua Achebe (if not from afar, then at any rate from across the Hudson) and, for the double keynote address, John Burt from Brandeis, editor of the definitive edition of Warren’s collected poems, and William Bedford Clark from Texas A&M, general editor of the Warren Correspondence Project. It was a truly impressive group of scholars and poets that Harry assembled for the occasion. Of course, our students made a big contribution as well, and Harry was the first to encourage and commend their work.

The issue of the Shawangunk Review in which the symposium papers were collected is equally special, and extravagant, running to a grand total of 257 pages (some 95,000 words). I was the co-editor of this tome and still remember the late-night labor that went into it. The length of the volume was owing in part to the ambition of the symposium but also to the pack rat side of Harry’s character. On top of the symposium proceedings, he wanted to include poems from a reading at the Oasis Café held to benefit New Orleans writers who were victims of Hurricane Katrina, and naturally he had to write a review of the newly published book of Hemingway’s African memoirs, Under Kilimanjaro. Somehow, he convinced me to include a section of literacy narratives from the Modern Theories of Writing course as well as four “other” student essays. Worthy additions all, though it seemed to me at the time, in the face of production deadlines, rather too much of a good thing. Then, at the last minute, Harry announced a real coup: he had secured permission from John Burt, Warren’s literary executor, to print the hitherto unpublished short story, “Goodbye, Jake,” which was Warren’s first. SR XVII is still the only place to find it. To complement the story, Burt kindly allowed us to include Warren’s famous poem “Amazing Grace in the Back Country” and, as an illustration of his writerly craft, facsimile pages of the successive drafts the poem went through. Let me note that, for the curious, SR XVII is also the only place to find the Warren-Stoneback correspondence.

It is Harry’s introduction to “Goodbye, Jake” that I have chosen for the present volume of SR. For me, it’s an example in miniature of his careful historical scholarship and sharp critical insight. I find the piece particularly interesting for the connections it draws between Robert Penn Warren, the celebrated writer, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, the neglected writer, whose work Harry tirelessly championed for the last twenty years of his life, introducing it to generations of students and making New Paltz the home of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society. Harry was always teaching.