Gerald Stern, Foreword to Rose, by Li-Young Lee (Rochester, N.Y.: BOA, 1986),
pp. 8–10.
Discusses Stern’s relationship with Lee and what he claims are Lee’s literary
influences. Stern also touches on the major themes of family, race, and spirituality
observed in Lee’s collection.
Xiaojing Zhou, “Inheritance and Invention in Li-Young Lee’s Poetry,” MELUS,
21 (Spring 1996): 113–132.
Examines how the speakers in Rose and The City in Which I Love You are shaped
by their experiences as immigrants in the United States and by their development
as poets.
—Isaiah Vianeseh
David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross
(Performed 1984; New York: Grove, 1983)For playwright David Mamet the connection between language and action is cru-
cial. He has said, “Actually, my main emphasis is on the rhythm of language—the
way action and rhythm are identical. Our rhythms describe—no, our rhythms
prescribe our actions. I became fascinated—I still am—by the way, the way the
language we use, its rhythm, actually determines the way we behave, more than
the other way around” (Leslie Kane, ed., Mamet in Conversation). Mamet is most
known for his attention to the sounds and sense of everyday speech rhythms. He
excels at the use of simple, sparse, direct, and often clipped dialogue. A critic of
his early plays advised audiences to “remember that name,” correctly predicting
the vital role Mamet would come to play in American theater. He is one of the
most important playwrights to emerge in the 1970s; his reputation rests on a large
body of work in which he portrays the moral, spiritual, and emotional corruption
of contemporary society.
David Alan Mamet was born in Chicago on 30 November 1947. He attri-
butes his fascination with language to his upbringing in a predominately Jewish
Southside neighborhood, where his grandmother spoke to shopkeepers “in what
could have been Yiddish, Polish, or Russian.” His father, Bernard Morris Mamet,
was a labor attorney who also instilled in him the importance of language by
encouraging him to learn complex rhymes from a recording produced by the
International Society for Semantics; his father later insisted that one of these
rhymes inspired Duck Variations (produced, 1972; published, 1978). His mother,
Lenore June Silver Mamet, was a teacher. Although his parents were the children
of Ashkenazi Jews from Poland, Judaism did not play the major part in their
home that it does in Mamet’s adult life. Mamet has described his childhood as
difficult. His parents, undemonstrative and critical of him and his younger sister,
Lynn (who also became a playwright), divorced in 1959. Soon after, his mother
remarried and relocated the family to Olympia Fields, a suburb of Chicago. He