“By and large, the writers assembled here have done most of their important work within the last two or three decades. In the absence of god, ‘unsponsored’ like the rest of their generation, they have spent their lives in the midst of the most terrible human possibilities without any real conviction that man can or even wishes to check himself before he destroys or maims the remaining life on his lone, already befouled, planetary home. In the face of such bleakness, the sheer fact of such bleakness, the sheer fact of the continued will to create is itself an affirmation, one which constitutes the particular courage- perhaps one should say defiance- of our contemporaries.”