• Short Prose

Mrs Lindbergh, Mr Ciardi and the Teeth and Claws of the Civilized World is an essay by American author Philip Roth on the large number of angry letters the Saturday Review received due to Poetry Editor John Ciardi's negative review of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's "The Unicorn and Other Poems." Philip Roth himself judged Anne Lindbergh's book to be "offensively bad" and the poetry "inept, jingling, slovenly, illiterate". - AsNotedIn

For someone like myself, who likes to consider himself a hearty magazine reader, 1957 promised to be a lousy year right from the start. You remember that near the end of last year, without warning, Collier's and The Woman's Home Companion locked their doors and shut down their presses. Then in the early hours of '57 both The New Republic and The Army, Navy, Air Force Journal were suddenly dropped from the newsstands. As though this weren't enough, on January 12th an unexpected blast set The Saturday Review quivering; for a moment one could hear timbers separating, bookspines cracking down the middle, the twin pictures of William Dean Howells and Sarah Orne Jewett crashing from the wall. Like towered Ilium, The Saturday Review seemed toppling from one man's treachery: the man, Poetry Editor John Ciardi; the treachery, his review of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's "The Unicorn and Other Poems."