“Visiting the Gregorys,” Hortense Calisher once remarked, “was like sitting at the fount of literature.” She and her husband, Curtis Harnack, called upon Horace Gregory and his wife, Marya Zaturenska, for many years. As did I and my wife, Judith Bloomingdale, and many others. The experience was unforgettable. Literary fashions and reputations change so quickly in America—remember Southern Gothic? The Beats? Black Humor? The New York School of Poets?—that it may be difficult for some to remember how important the Gregorys were. Marya won a Pulitzer Prize, Horace won the Bollingen, and their co-edited anthologies and co-written history of American poetry influenced and sometimes infuriated generations. Horace especially was a formidable figure, reviewing books in important quarterlies, serving on prize committees; of the two reputations, his endured longer. In her last decades, Marya lived in his shadow. He was a grand old man of letters, she a figure from the past. When one visited them, however, there was no evidence of their prior “importance.” What impressed one was the breadth of their knowledge and depth of their reading. This is what occasioned Hortense Calisher’s remark. They were among what Arnold Bennett called “the passionate few” who sustained literature.

Imet Marya first. I was at a party at the Gotham Book Mart on June 26, 1968, celebrating the publication of a new novel by James T. Farrell. Farrell and Gregory had been close friends for decades. I was standing beside Farrell and his companion, Cleo Paturis, when the latter exclaimed, “Jimmy, isn’t