I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.

It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning. That made the first American story (Parkman's): exploration.

Something else than a stretch of earth - seas on both sides, no barriers to contain as restless a thing as Western man was becoming in Columbus' day. That made Melville's story (part of it).¹

In 1953 the American poet, thinker and writer Charles Olson responded to a letter from a youngish English lawyer, novelist and literary critic (and University of London Summer School teacher), Ronald Mason, setting off a short but intense correspondence that illuminates twentiethcentury Anglo-American Arts and Letters, and, because of the particular intellectual vitality of Charles Olson, also illuminates the history of American thought and literature.

The principals in this correspondence were two ambitious young men approximately forty years of age, in their intellectual prime, each the author of a recognised of not well-regarded book on Melville, and each with a lot of writing behind them. Mason had written four novels by 1954 and Olson - never at a loss for words - had a lot of writing ahead of him; Olson would also go on to become one of the most intellectually fascinating and paradoxical figures in twentieth-century American literature: paradoxical because influential ...