In Paris he worked on ﬁlm projects at unesco for a time and began the investigations of Apollinaire and French culture that would lead to the publication of The Banquet Years a decade later. Shattuck had graduated from Yale in the spring of 1947, and he 4 0 S H A T T U C K Y celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday a week before writing the ﬁrst words included here.

What follows is a ﬁrst glimpse of Shattuck’s journals, a selection of entries from a period spent in Paris, from August 1947 to July 1948. No one has as yet made a thorough examination of this enormous manuscript, which his widow, Nora Shattuck, has given to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, where Shattuck taught in the 1960s. The range of the work suggests comparisons with the journals of Edmund Wilson, a writer Shattuck admired. Writing in a spirit by turns unabashedly introspective and soberly journalistic, Shattuck aimed to produce a record not only of his own life but of the life of his times. Army Air Corps in the Paciﬁc Theater during World War II through his last years living in Vermont, and encompasses love a√airs, friendships, travels in the United States, Europe, and Africa, and the composition of his many books. The journal, written in a miniscule, angular hand by no means easy to decipher, ranges from Shattuck’s early experiences in the U.S. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ģ 9 R ‘ ‘ T H E S W I F T F L O W O F T H I N G S ’ ’ F R O M T H E P A R I S J O U R N A L S, 1 9 4 7 - 1 9 4 8 R O G E R S H A T T U C K Edited and Introduced by Jed Perl When Roger Shattuck died in 2005 at the age of eighty-two, he left behind not only classic studies of modern culture and society, including The Banquet Years and Forbidden Knowledge, but also a journal that he had kept for more than ﬁfty years.

The banquet years by roger shattuck