In choosing a subject for a thesis in the Vergilian Bimillennium, it was only natural and fitting that the choice should fall in the field of Vergil. The difficulty lay in selecting a particular locality of the field that had not been especially explored by the many Vergil admirers. Friendships and Family Ties seemed to have been treated by no writer under such a title nor to have been discussed at length in any book or article. Here was presented an opportunity to renew my acquaintance with Vergil through a more intimate and thoughtful study of his poems and to search out from the numerous books on the general subject of Vergil what conclusions other writers had reached and to follow the line of through of the contemporary Latin scholars, who were contributing to the current literature of the Vergilian year. I was perhaps fortunate in finding that no one has treated the subject at any great length, for it required more serious thought on my part; my interest grew with the task; it was fascinating to piece together the little bits and make a unified whole.

The life of Heinrich Heine presents many contradictions. He was a militant Hebrew who never held to the tenets of the Jewish faith, a Christian who admired Jesus, but despised the dogmas of Christianity, a German who loved his country with all his heart but became a voluntary expatriate. In addition, he was a poet who could rise to the very heights or lyricism, but then offend his readers with an outburst of mockery or blasphemy. With a mind so tormented, and a character so complex, it is no wonder that his writings present so many conflicting views. Only one positive trait stands out bravely and convincingly, which gives color and direction to all his writings; his love of freedom, political and intellectual and his hatred of tyranny, in the state and in the Church.

The purpose of this thesis is to show how the music of “The Masque of Angels” articulates and supports the drama. The various musical techniques which make the complete composition will be examined to show how the composer draws them into one statement and proves himself the dramatist. The effect of the music on the text and that of the text on the musical construction is investigated to gain a clearer concept of the composer’s intent and the opera’s value to the twentieth century listener.

The Modesto Irrigation District is located on the eastern side of the Great Valley about half way from North to South. The Great Valley is really two distinct river valleys further divided by lesser stream valleys. The Sacramento River Valley is about 500 miles long and forms the northern half; and the San Joaquin Valley is about 350 miles long and forms the southern half. For many practical purposes local residents of this great Valley call it the Sac-Joaquin Valley. There are no hills or mountains to separate these valleys so we may consider them as one. The Sac-Joaquin Valley is almost ideal as far as irrigation is concerned. It is almost as flat as a table, dropping about 2-3 feet per mile toward the middle of the valley from the beginning of the valley proper westward to the Sacramento or San Joaquin River. The summers are long, hot, and cloudless; ideally suited to the ripening of tropic fruits.4 All the valley lacked was sufficient water. And the mountains now furnish that. We shall consider the Modesto area as being the area north of the Tuolumne River to the Stanislaus River and from the San Joaquin River on the west to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. By the early settlers this area was called Paradise Valley.2 A town of Paradise existed for a few years, having been laid out by a Mr. Jon Mitchell about 1867-683 It gave up and moved a few miles east into the new town of Modesto soon after the latter was started in 1870.4<68/sup> The Modesto Irrigation District now inclueds about 81,000 acres in the weatern part of this Paradise Valley.2 The land is almost flat, consisting of soils that are, as a whole, "light, the largest part of the area consisting of sandy loams and sands".3 The soil ideal for diversified agriculture, and it has now been proven that the soil types of Modesto District are best adapted to the applicaton of irrigation.4

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Doctorow has a curiously complex problem in Ragtime. He wants to say something meaningful, to arrive at some truth about the ragtime era of America; he wants to reveal the essence of the people of that eram who and what affected them, whom and what they affected. But the facts alone cannot solve Doctorow's program. They will provide only locatable, accountable, recorded deeds. Art, by itself, cannot solve the problem either, since the problem is too bound up in history. The problem of Ragtime, then, is to conjoin somehow the accountable facts and the unrecorded effects those facts might have had. Ragtime needs to show how the historical figures of the early twentieth century and their philosophies affected unnamed families and caused much social unrest and change. Doctorow's solutions is what might be called ragtime journalism. The new journalism attempted to create realistic novels that convinced us of their factual veracity by using real people and scenes to present an authentic recreation of reality. But Doctorow uses real people and scenes to create an unauthentic reality, to create a very obvious fiction.3.

The life of André Gide is divided into four periods: his early life which he considered his period of darkness, his adolescence which was his period of mental confusion, his early mature years which was his period of defiance, and his later years which was his period of leadership. By studying his life the growth of his individualistic approach to everything and his reasons for not conforming to the pattern established by tradition will be traced.

The purpose of this thesis, if with respect only to the short fiction, will be to provide some measure of resurrection for a much-ignored and much-maligned talent. Scholarly interest in John Steinbeck has been distinctly minimal and even his admirers admit his artistic decline of recent years. Unlike the attention lavished upon his illustrious contemporaries, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, the number of major critical surveys of Steinbeck's works can be counted upon the fingers of one's hand. It has been customary to regard Hemingway and Faulkner, usually in company with F. Scott Fitzgerald, as titans, while John Steinbeck's, cast as a johnny-come-lately, tends to be regarded as a dwarf among mammoths, an intruder among the immortals. Even those critics who, like so many readers, have enjoyed the gifted storytelling of the man, whose intentions are kind, and who come to praise, often stay, in the word of F. W. Watt, "to damn, or at least to remonstrate with the author on the theme of artistic seriousness and moral responsibility."2 Steinbeck is peculiarly annoying to his friends for the precise reason that many of his party have expected much more from him than he was perhaps able or capable of giving, especially after his departure from California. Certainly one of the most popular and repeated criticisms is that Steinbeck has never lived up to his potential, that he has never lived up to the promise he displayed in his "golden age" of the 'thirties, and that far greater things should have come from him to sustain a critical reputation which has suffered, especially in the post-war years, a steepening decline. Such indictments ignore the fact that by 1945 the expatriate and the southerner, like the man of the West, had already written the bes of what was within them. Thereafter, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck continued to write; but what they wrote, most agree, was not the measure of what had gone before.

In August, 1954, William Faulkner’s twentieth book of fiction, A Fable, was published. As might be expected by anyone knowing of Faulkner’s previous career and critical reception, the reviewers received it with widely divergent opinions. None seems to have found the book an unqualified success, the word “failure” occurs in many of the reviews, and a number confess inability to find motivation for various actions or the pertinence of certain episodes, More than one reviewer reveals quite obviously that he has not been able to follow the plot. As a matter of fact, the runner is one the few main characters who are alive at the end of the story, and his last words on the last page of the book probably contain the essence of the novel, as we shall see. However, reviews are necessarily printed soon after book distribution (this one apparently even before), and A Fable, like most of Faulkner’s books, requires more than one reading. It is apparent that despite several books, hundreds of shorter studies, and dozens of doctoral dissertations (virtually all since 1950) written about him, WIlliam Faulkner still remains a controversial figure. He is still writing and still expressing his highly quotable opinions to interviewers, Since his moral vision has long been a matter of interest and conjecture, since his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech presumably expressed his own credo for his life’s work, and since some disparity between the work and the credo has been claimed, and investigation of the moral implications of A Fable would appear to be worthwhile. One might ask the following questions: What sort of creature is man? What sort of world does he live in? How may man best live in his world? We shall determine Faulkner’s answers to there questions chiefly as he gave them in A Fable, although other sources may be an occasional help. In conclusion, some attempt will be made to relate this novel to Faulkner’s whole work to date in respect to point of view and artistic value.